Finally, there is the strangest narrator of the trio, another Sato, a member of the so-called Japanese United Red Army, "the victors of the battle at Lydda Airport", now a prisoner outside Beirut. He, too, has known Yoshiko, who seems sympathetic to his cause, and he finds "images flickering inside my head, as though my brain were a kind of cinema".

In fact, the whole of this densely-furnished novel is dominated by the powerful drug of the cinema. It strikes me that Buruma must have seen more bad films than can have been good for him; but his touch is so convincing that it doesn't matter.

Part of his strength is that he is well aware of things that many people don't want to know or acknowledge, such as the degree of self-deception there was, and still is, over political and racial matters: for example, Sato Daisuke's bland conviction that "we had made errors, and caused a great deal of inconvenience to the Chinese... But that is inevitable in times of great historical change".

The China Lover itself cries out to be made into a film. I hope that things are moving in that direction.