`SEARCH' CASTS INTENSE EYE ON HUMANITY-DRIVEN SUGIHARA.

Byline: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt The New York Times

Title: ``In Search of Sugihara: The Elusive Japanese Diplomat Who Risked His Life to Rescue 10,000 Jews From the Holocaust''

Author: Hillel Levine

Data: Illustrated. 323 pages, the Free Press; $25

Our rating: Three Stars

A Japanese diplomat who rescued 10,000 European Jews during World War II? At first, Hillel Levine's intriguing new book, ``In Search of Sugihara,'' seems hard to believe.

Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg is familiar as a savior, and so is German industrialist Oskar Schindler, with his list.

But Chiune Sugihara (pronounced chee-YU-nay su-gee-HAH-rah), who was Japan's consul in Lithuania in 1940, at the time the Soviet Union annexed the country and announced the closing down of the consulate? Who risked his career and his life, too, by churning out foreign transit visas with what Levine calls ``conveyer-belt efficiency'' for all Jews who wanted to escape the advancing Nazis? Why is he not better known? Is he perhaps a rumor or an illusion, a myth or a misunderstanding?

The author of ``In Search of Sugihara'' had doubts about his subject, too. A sociologist who is currently a fellow at the Harvard Russian Research Center and a visiting professor at the Logos Theological Seminary in Kyoto, Japan, Levine was deeply puzzled about Sugihara's motives. Did he act alone or have help? If he had help, what lay behind this ``conspiracy of goodness,'' as the author calls it? If he acted alone, did he have deep motives, or was his behavior evidence of what Levine, flipping the coin of Eichmann, calls the ``banality of goodness''?

To answer these questions, Levine dug deep into wartime archives and traveled all over the world in search of Sugihara's friends and relatives, and surviving eyewitnesses of his extraordinary acts. Unfortunately, his search doesn't reveal much about the man.

The record of Sugihara's life is sketchy. Practically all that is known of his childhood is his birthday, Jan. 1, 1900; his home town, Yaotsu, in Japan's Gifu Prefecture, near Nagoya; his family's status, ``what we might call the middle of the Yaotsu hierarchy,'' writes Levine; his father's profession, tax collector, and his youthful passions, baseball and the board game Go.

After high school, his gift for foreign languages won him a scholarship to study Russian at Harbin Gakuin National University in Manchuria. His training there in turn led to a professional career in the Imperial Japanese Army, the Foreign Ministry, the Manchurian Foreign Ministry and other related intelligence agencies. In 1939 he was sent to Lithuania with the assignment of keeping Tokyo informed of relations between the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. Little is revealed in such a resume about the making of a guardian angel.

So Levine is forced to broaden his investigation to take in Japanese culture, folklore, diplomacy, imperialism and attitudes toward Jews and the West. As Levine promises, ``understanding the transnational forces that shaped the world of Sugihara's childhood, upbringing and adulthood enables us to derive far more from the few reliable facts that we DO have.''

The results can be tantalizing. Levine concludes, for instance, that Sugihara may have acted despite his being sponsored by the faction in the Japanese government that favored alliance with Nazi Germany, which hints of remarkable courage and independence.

Elsewhere he describes the epic plot of a Japanese silent movie, ``The Forty-Seven Ronin,'' first shown in 1907, and wonders if Sugihara acted out its traditional lessons of spontaneous self-sacrifice in defying his masters.

Stretching thin evidence even further, he points out the curious fact that although Sugihara loved the piano and played it well, he would perform only a single piece, ``The Maiden's Prayer,'' a sentimental melody by Tekla Badarzewska-Baranowska. ``All Sugihara's musical acumen is poured into one song,'' writes Levine. ``All his compassion and powers of strategy are distilled into a few days of mass rescue.''

Yet despite such straining leaps by the author, Sugihara's character and motivation remain elusive. Even in a brief autobiographical fragment, written in 1967 in answer to a scholar's question, all he has to say about his behavior is, ``I acted according to my sense of human justice, out of love for mankind.'' He died in 1986 without ever revealing more.

Nor are Levine's speculations aided by the chaotic organization of his book, his repeated looping back to redescribe certain landmark events in his narrative, or his habit of switching erratically between Japanese history, Sugihara's professional career and the experiences of certain people he saved.

Ultimately the reader feels let down. Despite all of the ``structures of meaning'' that Levine tries to keep in the air, nothing impresses you as much as the words of the survivor who describes her encounter with Sugihara on Aug. 12, 1940: ``We kept on saying `thank you,' `thank you' in Polish, and he raised his hand to let us know it's OK and smiled at us.''

As Levine himself sums up his narrative, ``The profile of Chiune Sugihara emerges; the portrait of a mass rescuer still eludes us.''

Yet for all its shortcomings, ``In Search of Sugihara'' finally inspires you to believe that in a time of great evil a good man threw caution to the winds and acted out of simple humanity.

And, as Levine concludes, ``In illustrating for us how a common person can perpetrate a most uncommon act, he empowers us all as he challenges us to greater responsiveness and responsibility.''

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Photo: no caption (Book cover - In Search of Sugihara)