Isabel Allende's  2015 'The Japanese Lover' shares a theme with 'Love in the time of cholera'-- love sustained over half a century (see review posted on 5/28/16).  But there the similarity ends. One of the main characters is Irina Bazili, a 23 year Moldovan immigrant in a Malcolm X t-shirt, who comes to work at Lark House, a San Francisco home for the elderly, which 'for some unknown reason from the beginning ... had attracted left-wing intellectuals, oddballs, and second-rate artists'. Here she comes to know and work for the octogenarian Alma Belasco, an accomplished painter and designer who herself had come to San Francisco as a child from Poland in 1939 to live with her wealthy relatives. Irina and Alma's grandson Seth soon become intrigued with the mysterious letters Alma receives, gardenias which arrive at her door every week, and her occasional disappearances, for which she packs her best nightgowns.  As Irina surmises, there is a story here: of Alma's relationship since childhood with Ichimei Fukuda, the son of the Belasco's Japanese gardener. Twelve year old Alma is devastated when Ichimei's family is sent to a concentration camp after Pearl Harbor in 1941. Years later they are re-united, though only in a secret secret love, as Alma cannot bring herself to give up the comfort and privilege of life with the Belascos.  Even as an octogenarian, Alma says that if she had to do it again, she would make the same choice, as she thinks love would have died among the relative hardships of living as a gardener's wife.
         Along the way we meet a variety of characters, including Alma's husband, Nathaniel, her cousin who has always seemed like an older brother, and who knew of the affair and kept quiet.  When dying he reveals his knowledge and acceptance, since after all “Hearts are big enough to contain love for more than one person.” We also meet Samuel, Alma's older brother who had left 1939 Poland to join the Royal Air Force, and makes an appearance years later to relate an almost gratuitous tale of adventures and suffering in World War II.
          The main theme of the book seems to be to glorify a lifelong romance, that persists even after death.  But it is a very qualified love, one that takes a back seat to the desire for the perks of wealth and easy living. It's true, writing today it may be hard to imagine the degree of racial prejudice the young lovers would have faced had they gotten together in the 1940s. Was Alma wise in knowing that it never would have worked, or was she selfish, in wanting to have it both ways?  And how did Ichimei feel about the whole thing? We know little of him, aside from his deep love, and that he was a serene figure who loved gardening and painting. Indeed, for a central character in the book, he begins to feel more like a cartoon of an Asian, who we never get to know, and who we feel perhaps has been used. Similarly, one wonders whether Alma's husband could truly be as kind and understanding of her lifelong affair as he seems to be on the surface.  
  'The Japanese Lover' succeeds as a sweeping multi-generational story of the pre-war years until the present, but the kind of love it seems to glorify comes off as a little selfish and unfulfilling, and possibly destructive to the men in Alma's life. The book comes off not as a paean to the power of love, but to the power of the need to be loved.  

 


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