FICTION

THE MAN FROM JAPAN by Clive James (Random House: $19; 173 pp.) Humorous novels, even the most effective ones, will generally cause people to read a passage and say to themselves, “Ha-ha. That’s funny.” Perhaps they’ll give a little smile. However, “The Man From Japan,” by English writer and television personality Clive James, is the rare kind of book, that, instead of a polite grin, inspires loud raucous laughter. Whole paragraphs can be read twice just for the pleasure of laughing again.

Akira Suzuki is an ambitious but traditional Japanese man living in London. Jane Austen is an overweight punk rocker, drug addict whose only dependable quality is that she will behave with stunning inappropriateness in every possible situation. When this unlikely couple get together the result is hilarious. Japanese, Westerners, media, yuppies, sex and language all get skewered with equal amounts of intelligence and wit. Miraculously, none of this is mean-spirited, even when James pokes fun at the character of Jane Austen, an obviously tragic, disturbed person.

A more subtle pleasure of “The Man From Japan” comes from the questions James seems to be asking. Who are we as a culture? How much of that is media? What can we do to teach and strengthen younger people? These complex issues are always present yet never pushed, giving an underpinning of seriousness to a basically lighthearted novel.