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Tamiko
"Bold and provocative...a story of intense love and ambition." Longview Daily News Ivan Balin is a Chinese-Russian photographer who lives in Tokyo but is about to get a visa to achieve his long-held dream of moving America. He is involved in heated affair with Faye Wilson, an intensely erotic, and intensely neurotic, American woman, but he also finds himself passionately drawn to the Tamiko, an aristocratic Japanese woman working as a librarian at the Tokyo Press Club. Tamiko is skilled in the arts of love, but forbidden to practice them with men of other races -- until she decides that to win Ivan for herself, she must spirit him away to a mountain retreat and break every taboo she knows. The novel was adapted into the 1963 movie A Girl Named Tamiko starring Laurence Harvey, France Nuyen and Martha Hyer, directed by John Sturges from a screenplay by Edward Anhalt. "Kirkbride's competent, professional hand has drawn a dramatic tale of which one of the strongest elements in the exotic setting itself." New York Times "A pure love epic." San Francisco Call-Bulletin Ronald Kirkbride (1912-1973) was born in Vancouver, BC and is the author of many books, including Winds Blow Gently, Spring is Not Gentle, Only the Unafraid , and Dark Surrender , a book of poetry, four plays, and a biography of Guy de Maupassant. Tamiko is inspired by own romance with a Japanese woman.
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First published January 1, 1962
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February 3, 2025Tamiko (aka A Girl Called Tamiko) was a million-selling book at a time when that was a big number. It was also released as a 1962 film by Paramount pictures starring Laurence Harvey, France Nuyen, and Martha Hyer. Kirkbride is credited with two dozen novels including romances, westerns, and crime fiction.
Tamiko is a romance story, set in Post-war Japan. The lead character is Ivan Balin, whose mother was Chinese and father Russian and who had grown up in Shanghai. He is thirty four and has been waiting fourteen years for his visa to America to come through, the last seven in Tokyo. His parents were killed in the war and being half-Chinese and half-Russian, he feels like he doesn’t belong anywhere and has no roots, no connections.
In an American club, although he wants to be part of it all, he is ill at ease: “These immaculately dressed Americans exuded an ease and a careless security which filled Ivan with apprehension, bringing to mind only too vividly the Shanghai Club and the Race Club in China with their exclusive atmospheres and high-income groups which had never failed to make him feel a misfit, an imposter when invited there.”
Ivan works as a photographer while waiting for his ticket to paradise. He looked down on Japanese women as “gooks” and as tarts looking to ensnare unwitting GIs and get a ticket to the States. In 1959, Japan was still war-ravaged and not a booming manufacturing economy.
Ivan toys with one local girl, Eiko, who keeps asking him to marry her. But he barely wanted to dance with her and was bored with these Japanese girls who were all indistinguishable to him. When he meets tall regal Tamiko on a double date, she senses he is unhappy and asks why he goes out with Eiko if he doesn’t enjoy her company. He tells Tamiko that he is prejudiced because the Japanese killed his parents. She tells him to get over it, that her mother was killed in Hiroshima and her father was a slave in a Siberian salt mine, but even though Ivan was Russian, she bore him no ill will. In other words, take each person individually and holding world events against individuals.
Eiko though barely warrants a footnote in this story. The heart of the story is Ivan’s relationships with two women. The blonde graceful Fay Wilson, daughter of an airline president, practically engaged to another man, who likes to slip into Ivan’s bed at 1 a.m., but doesn’t want to be seen in public with him or to invite him to functions at her father’s home. When he shows up to ask her out to dinner, she says he mustn’t come there and it would be impossible to introduce him. But for Ivan, Fay symbolized the beauty and success that lay ahead of him when he finally reached America.
Meanwhile, though, he begins falling for the aristocratic Tamiko. “He had not thought much about it before and had taken one girl after another in his stride, but now he was faced with the realization that he had unwittingly stumbled on a rare jewel. And having made this discovery he found that he did not want to lose her. In fact, he could not imagine himself living without Tamiko for one day.”
The story here is a powerful romance, not much in the way of action, but also a voyage of discovery for Ivan who has to overcome his prejudices and to find what is meaningful to him rather than merely chase his fantasies of life in America.
Tamiko is a romance story, set in Post-war Japan. The lead character is Ivan Balin, whose mother was Chinese and father Russian and who had grown up in Shanghai. He is thirty four and has been waiting fourteen years for his visa to America to come through, the last seven in Tokyo. His parents were killed in the war and being half-Chinese and half-Russian, he feels like he doesn’t belong anywhere and has no roots, no connections.
In an American club, although he wants to be part of it all, he is ill at ease: “These immaculately dressed Americans exuded an ease and a careless security which filled Ivan with apprehension, bringing to mind only too vividly the Shanghai Club and the Race Club in China with their exclusive atmospheres and high-income groups which had never failed to make him feel a misfit, an imposter when invited there.”
Ivan works as a photographer while waiting for his ticket to paradise. He looked down on Japanese women as “gooks” and as tarts looking to ensnare unwitting GIs and get a ticket to the States. In 1959, Japan was still war-ravaged and not a booming manufacturing economy.
Ivan toys with one local girl, Eiko, who keeps asking him to marry her. But he barely wanted to dance with her and was bored with these Japanese girls who were all indistinguishable to him. When he meets tall regal Tamiko on a double date, she senses he is unhappy and asks why he goes out with Eiko if he doesn’t enjoy her company. He tells Tamiko that he is prejudiced because the Japanese killed his parents. She tells him to get over it, that her mother was killed in Hiroshima and her father was a slave in a Siberian salt mine, but even though Ivan was Russian, she bore him no ill will. In other words, take each person individually and holding world events against individuals.
Eiko though barely warrants a footnote in this story. The heart of the story is Ivan’s relationships with two women. The blonde graceful Fay Wilson, daughter of an airline president, practically engaged to another man, who likes to slip into Ivan’s bed at 1 a.m., but doesn’t want to be seen in public with him or to invite him to functions at her father’s home. When he shows up to ask her out to dinner, she says he mustn’t come there and it would be impossible to introduce him. But for Ivan, Fay symbolized the beauty and success that lay ahead of him when he finally reached America.
Meanwhile, though, he begins falling for the aristocratic Tamiko. “He had not thought much about it before and had taken one girl after another in his stride, but now he was faced with the realization that he had unwittingly stumbled on a rare jewel. And having made this discovery he found that he did not want to lose her. In fact, he could not imagine himself living without Tamiko for one day.”
The story here is a powerful romance, not much in the way of action, but also a voyage of discovery for Ivan who has to overcome his prejudices and to find what is meaningful to him rather than merely chase his fantasies of life in America.
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