Mr. Trevanian, whose first name and whose real name are withheld from us, explains rather late in the murderous game of his new thriller, "Shibumi," that "only in Japan was the classical moment simultaneous with the medieval."…

This, of course, is quite silly. Classical moments and medieval moments are invested and invoked whenever historians, or novelists, have run out of ideas with which to scratch and itch in the narrative. Such moments coincide arbitrarily, according to the needs of mythic flimflam. (p. 262)

Much, in fact, of "Shibumi" is quite silly. It just happens to be the most agreeable nonsense in commercial fiction this spring. The Mother Company, a consortium of oil companies that wants to control all the energy in the world and that has an uneasy alliance with the property-gobbling Organization of Petroleum Exporting Country greedies, takes over the Central Intelligence Agency in order to rationalize terrorism...