On Nov. 19, 2018, Nissan chairman Carlos Ghosn was taken into custody as he passed through Tokyo’s Haneda airport. He was eventually charged with underreporting his income and using millions in Nissan funds to cover personal investment losses, and if convicted he faced up to 15 years in prison. But after spending 130 days in custody, and posting $13.7 million in bail, he fled Japan for Lebanon, hiding in an audio equipment case as it was rolled onto a private jet. He now lives in Beirut, out of reach of Japanese prosecutors.

It’s an astonishing story, but only a small part of the one that Hans Greimel, a veteran car industry reporter, and William Sposato, a journalist based for many years in Japan, choose to tell in “Collision Course: Carlos Ghosn and the Culture Wars That Upended an Auto Empire.” Messrs. Greimel and Sposato’s book is less a tale of Mr. Ghosn’s rise and fall than an examination of the differences in corporate, legal and political cultures between Japan and the West. How is it that such advanced economies and societies can so often misunderstand each other? And was Mr. Ghosn simply a victim of this historic pattern?

Mr. Ghosn was born in Brazil to a family with Lebanese roots. As a child he moved to Lebanon and then France, where he stayed, earning a pair of engineering degrees and rising through the ranks at Michelin and later Renault. A citizen of France, Brazil and Lebanon, he is fluent in English, French, Portuguese and Arabic. In 1999, when Renault invested in Nissan, Mr. Ghosn was tapped as chief operating officer of the Japanese automaker.

At Renault, headquartered near Paris, Mr. Ghosn was known as “Le Cost Killer,” and in his new role he more than lived up to his reputation. He cut jobs, closed plants, paid down debt and renegotiated with suppliers, paying no regard to Japan’s cozy corporate networks and traditions. Within three years Mr. Ghosn had risen to become chief executive, and Nissan was back in the black. He lived the part of the globe-trotting corporate titan, jetting frequently between Tokyo and Paris and elsewhere, preaching the importance of scale in the car industry. In the meantime, he and his wife raised four children, before they divorced in 2012. When Mr. Ghosn married a second time in 2016, he celebrated with a party at the Palace of Versailles that would come to symbolize his growing hubris.

While other international car partnerships failed, including Daimler-Chrysler and Volkswagen-Suzuki, Mr. Ghosn made Renault-Nissan work. He capped his career in 2016 with the purchase of a controlling stake in Mitsubishi, creating the largest auto group in the world. One of Mr. Ghosn’s former advisers told the authors of “Collision Course” that what his boss was trying to do “was unprecedented in the history of the auto industry, which was combine strong companies that are truly nationally significant and keep them together,” not just for one economic cycle but in a way that “was really permanent.” Given the economic and symbolic importance of the car industry, he was also frequently having to manage the attentions of meddlesome politicians.

Still, he never imagined he would be arrested and threatened with years in prison. In one version of this story, Mr. Ghosn was the fall guy in a battle between the French at Renault and the Japanese at Nissan. Mr. Ghosn himself points to the moment in 2018 when Renault urged him to make the alliance with Nissan “irreversible.” The Japanese were not so keen on the idea and began scheming to block the French plans. Taking down Mr. Ghosn became essential.

According to Nissan, though, Mr. Ghosn was a flat-out crook. He treated company money as his own and surrounded himself with yes-men who were too frightened to hold him to account. An internal report commissioned after his arrest concluded that within the company Mr. Ghosn had been “deified” as “a savior who had redeemed Nissan from collapse, and his activities were deemed impenetrable territory.” It concluded that Nissan suffered from a “corporate culture in which no one can make any objections to Mr. Ghosn.”

In a 2020 interview, Mr. Ghosn said his tough leadership style was essential. “Between 1999 and 2018, you never heard about any problem, because, obviously, I was the final decision-maker, I instilled a spirit of cooperation against the extremes. But we knew that the extremes were always there. They were always going to take advantage of any situation to have their opinion prevailing. They accused me of being a dictator, but frankly I was a decision-maker.” One man’s decision maker, another’s corporate kleptocrat.

Messrs. Greimel and Sposato describe Japan’s legal system as one “where prosecutors wield much of the power and acquittals are rare.” Defense attorneys are not allowed to attend interrogations, which leaves suspects vulnerable during long periods of pre-trial custody. Mr. Ghosn was subjected to many hours of such questioning. Japanese prosecutors point to their 99% conviction rate as evidence of their effectiveness. Others say it suggests a system tilted heavily against the accused.

Upon arriving in Beirut, Mr. Ghosn said that “I have not fled justice—I have escaped injustice and political persecution.” In a later interview he described the experience of his arrest: “It doesn’t just sound like a Kafka novel. It is a Kafka novel.” Despite all he had done for Renault, Mr. Ghosn was quickly abandoned by the French, notably President Emmanuel Macron, who had no interest in defending a corporate leader at a time of labor unrest in his country.

Messrs. Greimel and Sposato write that their central character remains a mystery: “Perhaps only those who best understood Ghosn can really say whether he was a sentimental family man or a cold, calculating corporate executive, a visionary innovator or a self-absorbed autocrat, . . . the unsuspecting victim of a boardroom coup or simply a C-suite swindler.” Is it possible, the authors ask, that he was a “complicated combination of all these things”? Absent a trial, the truth of this strange affair may never be fully known.

Mr. Delves Broughton is the author of “The Art of the Sale: Learning From the Masters About the Business of Life.”