BOOK REVIEW : Laughing Across the Great Pacific Divide : PACIFIC RIFT<i> by Michael Lewis</i> , W. W. Norton, $14.95; 144 pages

This is a nonfiction volume about the varied misunderstandings and frayed nerves that afflict the business relationship between America and Japan. It’s more than a pleasure to read; it’s a laugh riot.

Michael Lewis must have--at some point--totally ditched the notion that a journalist has to take all this seriously, or that something bad might happen if somebody’s feelings get hurt.

Lewis pokes mean fun at American assumptions: “American attitudes toward Japan are distorted by the faith that, deep down, the Japanese want a society, and therefore an economy, modeled after our own. This is a curious view, when every important American-style change in Japan has been made while staring into the barrel of a gun or under the threat of American trade sanctions.”

But Lewis is equally whimsical about the Japanese and what he sees as an attitude both pathologically attached to the status quo and pathologically drawn to disaster, accidents, quixotic gestures and generalized screw-ups. The Japanese, as they engage in business with Americans, are, Lewis suggests, about “as reluctant as a nun on a date.”

They are not, however, as cool-and-in-control as our own paranoid fantasies would have us believe: “It seems that every day in Japan some unsuspecting Japanese drives his car into a volcano or is swept off a beach by a wave . . . . Personally,” Lewis continues, “I have yet to understand why, when a Japanese is walking down the beach and sees a big wave coming, he doesn’t just step aside like they do on the New Jersey shore.”

From this ambiguous, not to say irreverent position, the author outlines his own journalistic approach to this short volume, which is to find an American doing business in Tokyo, and a Japanese working out of New York; follow them around, watch them as they stumble, record their successes, diagnose their attitudes and assess, if possible, the chances for these two great countries ever to come to some kind of financial and cultural accord.

I think Lewis is telling us two things here. (1) Don’t hold your breath and (2) Don’t get too upset about the situation; it’s not worth your time and trouble.

Lewis’ first example is Robert Collins, an insurance executive whose company managed to sneak into Japan during that narrow time slot after the end of World War II when Gen. MacArthur was in charge and the kaibatsu (the formidable conglomerate of ancient Japanese family/corporations) was temporarily held down by the little matter of defeat. Even then, American International Group was able to to grab only an astonishingly small share of Japanese insurance revenues. Lewis tells why in a way that can only make you laugh.

Returning to the United States, the author introduces the reader to Shugi Tomikawa, a product of Harvard Business School, now in the real estate trade, whose job it is to scout out U.S. properties for Japanese buyers and to herd squadrons of exhausted Japanese businessmen through the streets of New York, issuing dire warnings about “wine bottle gangs” and Times Square. The executives return home after surviving arduous difficulties, not having had any kind of “good time” but with their prestige much increased.

Prestige, not financial gain, is what has motivated the recent enthusiastic Japanese purchases of so many pieces of prime American real estate, if we are to believe Lewis, who opines: “No Japanese investor has made money yet in the New York real estate business.” It has more to do with them than us, he says: Mitsui and Mitsubishi duking it out in the streets of New York, with Americans as bemused--if not altogether innocent--bystanders.

What has happened from all this, as the author remarks in another context, is that “everyone became hysterical at once.” Nothing combats hysteria like wit, silliness and laughter. Lewis combines these with intelligence. The result is an informative, ultimately very reassuring book.

Next: John Wilkes on “Murasaki: A Novel in Six Parts” by Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, David Brin, Nancy Kress and Frederick Pohl (Bantam).