Yoshihide Soeya's book, which emerged from his University of Michigan dissertation, covers the period from the end of World War II until China's opening outward with the ascendancy of Deng Xiaoping in 1978. This was a period when inordinately complex legal and political arrangements, concocted by particularly astute Japanese politicians, enabled Japan to conduct trade with both Taiwan and the People's Republic of China (PRC). It was also a period, for the most part, in which China and Japan did not have diplomatic ties. Although sometimes a bit tedious in describing the intricacies of all this, Soeya has done quite a creditable job of explicating the often tortuous bilateral ties between the two countries over three decades.