Robin Antepara.

Robin Antepara is a free-lance writer currently living in Japan.

In the past ten years, a number of remarkable books by Chinese women have been published to international acclaim: Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai, and Jung Chang's Wild Swans are two that come to mind.

Despite the seismic changes that have rocked Japan in the past fifty years, no stories of such archetypal power have emerged from the pens of Japanese women. What we have instead is a growing body of work by Westerners (mostly men) writing about Japan. Many of these books-memoirs by backpackers finding themselves in Tokyo's neon canyons, academics proselytizing for and against Japan's new economic religion-are easily forgotten. Several that have come out in the past year or two, however, are not so easy to put aside.

Arthur Golden's novel, Memoirs of a Geisha (Vintage, $14, 434 pp.), is one. Given the dearth of books by Japanese women, it's a little ironic that a Western man has created such a thoroughly believable portrait of a Japanese female. Written in the first person, the book tells the story of Sayuri: how she was snatched out of a fishing village and sold to a geisha house in Kyoto when she was only ten, and of her metamorphosis from ragtag child to refined and accomplished lady.

Perhaps part of the appeal of this best-selling novel is how its aura of intimacy contrasts with the opaque image Japan generally has for Westerners, who otherwise find it difficult to penetrate the mysteries of a Noh mask, let alone the granite facade of Japan Inc. Golden slowly reveals the strains of passion and animosity that broil beneath the surface of polite geisha society, breathing life into Sayuri with every turn of the page. The only way he's able to pull off this extraordinary act of impersonation is by telling the story through the Westernized voice of this aging geisha as she works on her memoirs in New York City-a device that also helps to create a bridge to the more exotic aspects of the story.

Another author who creates an almost palpable feeling of intimacy is David Chadwick in his biography: Crooked Cucumber-The Life and Zen Teaching of Shunryu Suzuki (Broadway, $26, 432 pp.). Suzuki, best known as the author of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (he is unrelated to the famous D.T.), was largely unknown inside his native Japan. He labored silently at a country temple until, at age fifty-five, he was able to fulfill a lifelong dream and go to America. By the time of his death in 1971, he had built a nationally recognized Zen Center and started America's first Zen Buddhist monastery.

That Suzuki was loved and revered by his American students is abundantly clear. But Chadwick, who studied with Suzuki in the late 1960s, does not stop at this. He digs into Suzuki's past and probes his shadow side, examining how Suzuki, a rather staid and duty-bound priest, was humanized by a family tragedy that he himself helped bring about. Chadwick's great accomplishment is that, by story's end, we love Suzuki just as much for his faults as for his talent for conveying Buddhist teachings to his American students.

Like Chadwick and Golden, John Dower, a professor of history at M.I.T., also has a passion for exploring the modern Japanese psyche. His latest book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (W.W. Norton, $29.95, 676 pp.), is a sweeping, almost epic, look at Japan in the years after the war. Since more than six of those years involved the intense presence of American troops, much of the book is taken up with a less- than-flattering portrayal of the occupation as well.

However, it is the Japanese experience that most concerns Dower. Indeed, the M.I.T. historian has made a career of seeing things from the side of the vanquished, and Embracing Defeat is no exception. He relentlessly delves into racist stereotypes of Japan, chastising those who would seek to place the Japanese into neat categories. However, unlike a number of other academics who write of a Japan that can do no wrong, Dower can be equally tough on the Japanese, lambasting homilies on Japanese uniqueness and harmony. Embracing Defeat is a book that is as entertaining as it is penetrating, as provocative as it is fair-minded. For anyone interested in a closer look at the world's second largest economy and the often opaque culture in which it flourishes, any of these three books is not a bad place to start.