Rising Sun
Crichton, Michael
"You're not suggesting, Sir Denis, that we are up against Dr. Fu Manchu?"... "I believe there is no secret society of this character, however small or remote, which is not affiliated to the...
...A call girl: "But then, what they want to do—at least, some of them...
...I do not mind if they suffer a little now," she says, and adds, "Oh, I hate them...
...A reporter at the Los Angeles Times: "The Japanese have a powerful influence at the paper...
...Rising Sun is not without virtues, as befits the author of such great airplane reading as The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park...
...Unfortunately, we do make some things—noxious things like this book, which makes disturbing use of exactly the same sorts of clichés about the Japanese that informed Nazi notions about world Jewry...
...It not only "delivers the unique Crichton mix—breathtaking suspense and cutting edge technology—at its most explosive," as the dust jacket promises, but also includes a three-page bibliography of various treatises on the supposed Japanese takeover of the United States...
...So does Crichton's, only his novel condemns an entire nation, not a fanciful genius with hypnotic powers and a very, very long moustache...
...The murder, in fact, is tied up in the politically controversial sale of a high-tech American company to a Japanese firm...
...It's more than their relentless PR machine drumming out of Washington, or the local lobbying and the campaign contributions to political figures and organizations...
...So eager are the Japanese for the sale to go through that they obstruct the police investigation...
...That natives of the Pacific Islands are indirectly controlled by this group, I know for a fact...
...But for the most part, his book reads less like a novel and more like the transcription of a radio call-in show in Detroit right after one of the Big Three announces a bunch of layoffs...
...The Fu Manchu books popularized the idea of a pan-Asian "Yellow Peril...
...America has become a land without substance," John Connor says...
...One need only look at Cyril Connolly—who spent the decade longing for the eighteenth century or Augustan Rome—to see that this is an illuRichard Lamb is a writer living in New York...
...It's just that Americans believe there is some core of individuality that doesn't change from one moment to the next...
...And to them, their wishes, their desires, it's just as natural as leaving the tip...
...Near the end of the novel, the idiotic Peter Smith asks the wise John Connor why the Japanese are moving so fast to take over America...
...Every American politician is in the pocket of Japanese interests, as is every American academic...
...There are a multitude of reasons—one is the dread PBS factor...
...The last thing he felt was the sudden pain of a heart attack, not the cool of oiled steel against epiglottis...
...Rising Sun is ostensibly a police procedural about the murder of a Los Angeles party girl which has been captured on videotape that turns out to have been John Podhoretz is a visiting fellow at the Hudson Institute...
...They're strange people...
...He did walk away from a plane crash, but did not chase imaginary Nazi subs in a fishing boat...
...electronically doctored...
...has there been so outrageous a work of popular fiction as Michael Crichton's bestselling Rising Sun...
...T here are no affairs with starlets, no carcasses of carnivores in the African bush...
...Every character within whose eyes are slanted is interchangeable...
...Another is the era both wrote best about, for the twenties, like the sixties, loom as a time when romantic cravings were satisfied just by living...
...That's because it's Crichton's favorite word in this novel...
...They try to buy a house for one of the detectives and when he refuses, they have him investigated for child abuse...
...The book is full of denunciations of American companies, American parents, American finance, and just about everything else American...
...And the Japanese believe context rules everything," Connor says, later adding helpfully, "Behavior that seems sneaky and cowardly to Americans is just standard operating procedure to Japanese...
...And it's starting to be insidious...
...There is nothing new about this...
...I believe there is no secret society of this character, however small or remote, which is not affiliated to the organization known as the Si-Fan...
...3 RISING SUN Michael Crichton Alfred A. Knopf/335 pages/$22 reviewed by JOHN PODHORETZ The American Spectator May 1992 71 A wise cop: "The Japanese are the most racist people on earth...
...This is only a taste of the—literallyhundreds upon hundreds of rank generalizations made on page after page of this tract...
...We don't make things anymore...
...But though Crichton directs his readers to the turgid whinings of Clyde Prestowitz and his ilk, his work is far closer to Rohmer's in spirit and tone...
...They're all working for the Japanese anyway...
...Not since the early decades of this century, when Sax Rohmer wrote his series of potboilers about "the stupendous genius" Fu Manchu and his Si-Fan—"the most ghastly menace to our civilization which has appeared since Attila the Hun...
...In death, he became an industry...
...why not Negroes of West Africa...
...Usually...
...They don't even know what they're afraid of...
...They're just afraid...
...It's the sum of those things and more...
...Crichton attempts to cover himself against the obvious charges of racism and xenophobia by coming across like a cultural relativist gone especially berserk...
...They even send assassins to dispatch a policeman in his home where his infant daughter must cower in terror on the floor...
...I mean, you can be sitting around in a staff meeting discussing some article that we might run, and you suddenly realize, nobody wants to offend them...
...You'll notice I keep using the word "they" to describe the Japanese...
...He can dress it up any way he wants, but the end message of this book is exactly the same as Sax Rohmer's: There's a malevolent force coming out of the East that is stronger, smarter, wiser, and meaner than any other on earth, and its aim is world domination...
...Waugh once observed, "I am coupled always (greatly to my honor) with Hemingway as a 'beat up old bastard.' " Why this popularity amounting to obsession...
...Sometimes I look at my editors, and I can tell they won't go with certain stories because they're afraid...
...Connor answers: "They know that sooner or later there will be a backlash...
...They have this—this way...
...Crichton has come up with a stunning plot—albeit one so technical and special-effectsladen that it will be far easier to understand when it hits your local movie screen next year...
...There is no escaping it: Evelyn Waugh has become the Anglo-Hemingway...
...A senator: "I have colleagues who say sooner or later we're going to have to drop another bomb...
...The Mask of Fu Manchu, 1907 Why not Americans in Los Angeles, 1992...
...It isn't a question of whether a story is right or wrong, news or not news...
...A bitter cop: "This country's in a war and some people understand it, and other people are siding with the enemy...
...His mouthpiece, a brilliant LAPD detective with long experience of Japan and the Japanese named John Connor, is forever explaining to his hopelessly dim sidekick, Peter Smith, why we have to understand the Japanese for what they really are...
...Scratch a Japan-basher like Crichton, and right underneath what you really find is an America-basher...
...Every one of them has the same secret motives and the same pernicious ends in mind—save a turncoat female who helps the police because she grew up handicapped and was therefore ostracized by her fellow Japanese...
...I don't feel that way...
...Another cop: "What do you want to do, write your congressman...
...But he was a conscientious artist at pains to hide it, wore a carapace of bluster, and married a girl with a boy's haircut...
Vol. 25 • May 1992 • No. 5
