"Audrey Hepburn's Neck" is a disarmingly funny book, if one that shimmers with tragedy. It's that very mesh that makes Alan Brown's first novel so appealing: this is outsider-lit without self-pity, a fresh tumble into the margins in which every moment of alienation is countered by understated observations about the clash, and occasional synchronicity, between all things American and Japanese. Set largely in Tokyo, the novel delves into both a dense cityscape of futuristic kitsch -- with its colorfully monikered Love Burger, Let's California Beer Garden and Fly Sexy Snack Bar -- and the quieter reaches of rural Japan where Toshiyuki Okamoto, or Toshi, came of age in an unadorned room above his father's noodle shop. Now 23, Toshi has landed a job as a cartoonist in Tokyo, plus an American best friend, Paul, a gay ad exec with a huge apartment and equally expansive appetites, and an American squeeze, Jane, who teaches at the Very Romantic English Academy. Then there's Lucy, yet another American. She's a composer with a neck as lovely as that of Audrey Hepburn, the woman whose onscreen magnetism gave 9-year-old Toshi his first jolt of fascination with Western ways.

Brown, an American who spent seven years in Tokyo as a Fulbright scholar, renders the point of view of a young Japanese man with an insidery bent, even as he grants Toshi the kinds of quirks and sensitivities that transcend borders. In one fine sketch, Toshi is flummoxed when Paul and Lucy, upon first meeting, find a kind of easy grace as compatriots that Toshi will never have with either of them: "He is hurt and angry and can't distinguish between longing and memory. Who is he angry at? he wonders, panicking. Paul? Lucy? A mother who left him? . . . Why doesn't anyone ever tell him the most important things?"

Equally sharp -- and impeccably droll -- is a scene in which Toshi's boss shows off his new rent-a-dog, procured to reduce work stress, just as a bracing earthquake tilt-a-whirls the premises. Given the multitude of temblors in his short life, Toshi's sense of security is anything but absolute. Yet, as tenderly imagined in "Audrey Hepburn's Neck," his quest for connectedness is as heroic as they come.

--Elizabeth Pincus