SOURCE: "It Can't Happen Here," in The New York Review of Books, Vol. XXXIX, No. 8, April 23, 1992, pp. 3-4.

Buruma is a Dutch-born American critic and editor who has written extensively about Japan and Japanese culture. In the following review of Rising Sun, he compares Crichton's negative portrayal of the Japanese to the German anti-Semitic film Jew Süss (1940) and to a contemporary Japanese anti-Semitic book, The Day the Dollar Becomes Paper.

Once in a while—in America perhaps more than once in a while—a book comes along whose interest is chiefly in the hype attending it. Rising Sun is such a book. The text of the publicity handout announced that this "explosive new thriller [was] rushed to publication one month earlier than previously announced because of its extraordinary timeliness with regard to US-Japan relations."

This is unusual: thrillers are not generally rushed out to match political events...