Tokyo Prose : NOVEL : AUDREY HEPBURN’S NECK, <i> By Alan Brown (Pocket Books: $21; 290 pp.)</i>

What was the pivotal event, the thing that changed the direction of my entire life, that carried me halfway around the world?,” asks Paul, a gay American living in the vibrant Japan of Alan Brown’s first novel. “A photograph of Yukio Mishima in a loincloth. That’s what.”

Paul’s friend Toshi, the young Japanese protagonist of “Audrey Hepburn’s Neck,” has no choice but to accept the American’s take on the irrationality of human attraction--and its far-reaching consequences. Toshi is himself trying without much success to get out of a passionate mess with his lunatic, arsonist English conversation teacher, Jane Borden (“like Lizzy who chopped up her father with an ax,” she explains cheerfully). She has specialized in Japanese men ever since, at the age of 15, she saw Toshiro Mifune in “Rashomon.” A gentler soul than Jane, Toshi was nevertheless sexually imprinted in much the same way: He traces his own obsession with foreign women back to his 10th year, when he and his mother, passing a thermos of green tea between them, sat spellbound before the image of Audrey Hepburn in “Roman Holiday.”

Images are at the heart of this acute and acutely funny novel. Nearly all the people in it are powerfully swayed not only by mass media images (“Jane and her friends,” Toshi reflects, “offer up their unhappy childhoods like movie plots”) but by their own private, romantic stereotypes of the “other.” (One of Brown’s implicit themes is the erotic quality of foreignness, especially of foreign languages.) Sometimes--as Toshi learns when he sets off from his father’s noodle shop in rural, remote Hokkaido to make his fortune in Tokyo--the “other” can even be an alien culture within one’s own people.

Toshi is also a maker of images, a talented cartoonist in the childish manga tradition who, as he matures, will find a way within it to address his own grave family history. But the book’s most notable image-maker is its American author who, in daring to see with the eyes of a Japanese character has embraced, gingerly but lovingly, the multiple identities of Japan itself.

This is a xenophobic country, as Brown only half-amusingly shows us, where tourist guidebooks for the Japanese warn that “foreigners carry AIDS and other diseases from abroad” and the prospect of imported American rice is reason to riot. (I hope Brown is exaggerating when he presents us with a computer game in which Japanese fighter planes perpetually strafe a cartoon Pearl Harbor.) And yet it’s a country where fluency in English is as desirable an attainment as, say, fine calligraphy once was and is nearly synonymous with sexual happiness. Toshi meets Jane in the Very Romantic English Academy, in the Hysterical Glamour Building. What may well be the world’s most incongruous country needs a novelist with a poet’s gift for linking incongruities.

Brown’s similes and metaphors are unexpected, as good ones always are, and yet on reflection seem inevitable. The young woman who eventually steals Toshi’s heart steals ours because she has “short hair hooked behind her ears like window curtains pulled back to let in the sunlight.” At an evening picnic, under cherry blossoms, “wooden chopsticks click like cicada legs.” The rightness of Brown’s imagery owes much to his cultural immersion: Japanese things are often viewed in terms of other Japanese things, not Western ones. A gravel road “tapers off to nothing, like a Zen conundrum.” (This is the road to Toshi’s childhood home, which indeed holds a terribly sad secret within.) My favorite image is of a green kimono, “the color of the seaweed you wrap around rice.” It’s not just the shade of green but the verb “wrap” that wraps kimono and seaweed together.

On a larger scale, Brown deftly juggles subplots that are in some way images of Toshi’s quest for the perfect “other” to share his life with. Though the adult Toshi, unlike the child, doesn’t actually hope to win Audrey Hepburn, he’s forever half-consciously linking moments in his own life to scenes in her movies. (You have to be a Hepburn fan to identify them--like that attempted suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning in “Sabrina.”) Meanwhile, as Paul looks for romance in promiscuity, the Crown Prince is accepting formal applications from prospective brides. Even he isn’t immune to Hollywood images; is it really true, after so many young Japanese women have enrolled in bridal training academies, that he plans instead to marry Brooke Shields?

As often with first novels, even short and charming ones like this one, “Audrey Hepburn’s Neck” sometimes staggers a bit under the weight of its author’s desire to inject every possible theme into it. The book casts at least a glance at nearly every social crisis and even geological challenge that has faced modern Japan: earthquakes so powerful they nearly obliterate the past; the smoldering anger, half a century old, of Korean women forced into prostitution by the Japanese army; an overcrowding in Tokyo so extreme that people don’t actually own pets, they just rent them for the day. There are wobbly moments, too, when Toshi’s English seems either better or worse than we’ve been led to believe.

But on page after page, Brown’s touch, both as observer and stylist, is sure and accurate. Ultimately, I wouldn’t want to delete the earthquake from the book, for then we’d lose the collapsed lighthouse “on the rocky promontory, its inner staircase a spiraling, bleached skeleton.” It’s a rare writer who combines such delicacy with a zany sense of humor: “Take my wallet. Take my wristwatch. Take my leather coat, please. Please don’t shoot,” runs the English conversation drill at the Very Romantic English Academy. And the affecting friendship of Toshi and Paul, who is openly in love with Toshi but never attempts again to seduce him after the first “no,” is just one instance of the subtlety and reticence that make this book a serious one when it must be.