Volume 55, Number 20 · December 18, 2008
An Asian Star Is Born
By Christian Caryl
The China Lover
by Ian Buruma
Penguin, 394 pp., $26.95
Ian Buruma's life would itself make a nice subject for a novel. His father was Dutch; his mother was British, from a family that emigrated from Germany in the nineteenth century; as an undergraduate in the Netherlands he focused on Chinese literature, then moved to Tokyo, where he turned himself into an expert on Japanese cinema. He went on to work in Hong Kong, London, Budapest, and Berlin. He has written about everything from yakuza tattoos to V.S. Naipaul to the ideological pedigree of Islamism.
Review, 3925 words
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