James A. Michener's 'Sayonara'

James A. Michener's 'Sayonara' is a brilliant novel about a hotshot U.S. Air Force pilot's forbidden romance with a Japanese woman in 1952, when he's stationed in Kobe during the Korean War.

It's a breezy read at 208 pages, with hardly a word wasted -- a rarity for Michener, known for his lengthy historical tomes.

The novel is engrossing because of its authenticity, which makes sense given that it's loosely autobiographical. The first-person narration feels like the honest musings of a lovesick 28-year-old, torn between his lust for his Japanese lover and his father's expectation that he will marry an upstanding white woman from a military family.

Michener confronts the U.S. government's racist policies that deterred military men from marrying foreign women, with the novel defining love as a product of our common humanity that transcends racial, cultural, and legal barriers.

The best paragraph (p. 102):

It was breathlessly apparent to us as the sun sank below the distant hills that in terribly crowded Japan Hana-ogi and I were seeking a place in which to make love. There was now no thought of Japanese or American. We were timeless human beings without nation or speech or different color. I now understood the answer to the second question that had perplexed me in Korea: "How can an American who fought the Japs actually go to bed with a Jap girl?" The answer was so simple. Nearly a half million of our men had found the simple answer. You find a girl as lovely as Hana-ogi -- and she is not Japanese and you are not American.