On the surface, One Chrysanthemum is a beautiful book for those seeking prose that evokes fragrant Japanese cherry blossoms and the mysticism of the East. However, it is precisely this superficiality that prevents the novel from being more than a light escapist read.

Joan Itoh Burk, a food and lifestyle columnist for The Japan Times, lived in that country for 13 years and has been writing of her experiences there since her return to North America. This novel is her attempt to capture the Japan of 1965, where tradition and modernity collide in a nation still reeling from wartime tragedy.

The narrative revolves around Misako, a clairvoyant housewife stuggling with visions of her husband’s infidelity and with the haunting memories of a drowning that she “saw” as a child. Cast out from her family home, Misako suddenly finds herself adrift as she circulates in the mysterious world of Buddhist monks and the glitter of postwar Tokyo.

Despite a concerted effort to provide insight into postwar Japanese life, the novel feels like the accounts of an outsider representing a culture that she views as strangely and alluringly different. The questionable part of the book lies in descriptions that aim to please by fulfilling Western expectations of Japanese myth and inscrutability. The writing is sensual, but its preoccupation with creating an “Oriental” effect prevents it from portraying characters and situations with sufficient depth. Instead, the separation between Western influence and Eastern timelessness simplifies Japan into a place of irreconcilable opposition.

In Misako, Burk constructs a character who is supposed to embody a changing definition of Japanese femininity, but who lacks complexity as she plays out the role of a submissive wife torn between new desire and old constraint. The story gets reduced to a tale of mystery and romance that uses hints of the exotic for Eastern flavour. Japan emerges as a place of grace and remembered passion, but one that ultimately eludes Burk’s grasp.