Wrong About Japan has already attracted quite a bit of attention, including being serialized on BBC World Service radio within weeks of publication. This is not surprising. Australian novelist Peter Carey, now living in New York, has twice won the UK's Man Booker Prize and is a major, if quirky, figure on the literary scene. Getting himself invited to Japan to meet fellow artists can't have been difficult, but what he offers here is not a magisterial overview of contemporary artistic Tokyo but a whimsical account of a trip he took to a country he thinks he understands in the company of his 12-year-old son.
Carey senior's mind is full of the past: films like The Seven Samurai, Japanese swords and the novels of Yukio Mishima. His son Charley, on the other hand, thinks only in terms of manga (comic books) and anime (animated films). All the famous artists they meet in Tokyo think like Charley, while Carey senior bumbles on trying to make sense of what he sees in terms of an older Japanese culture he tries to convince himself he understands.
This is a nice theoretical structure for a short book like this, and Carey is wise enough to understand that there isn't a great deal of mileage in it. In a sense, it's an opportunity to publish interview material with some celebrated names in light-weight form -- he says he always was a terrible interviewer. Funny old Carey posing his earnest critical interpretations and Japanese directors responding with "Mmmmmm" or a plain "No" while Charley looks on in embarrassment is the basic situation in most of the interview situations.
Before they arrive, Charley has extracted a promise from his father that they won't have to visit any of "the real Japan." This phrase refers to an earlier trip made by Carey senior with someone his own age when they sought out kabuki, ryokan and temple bells amidst what looked to them like the international-style uniformity of the indus-
trialized Japanese world. Charley wants none of this but instead the more instant pleasures of the modern Japanese youth culture.
His father mostly complies, though they do go to a kabuki performance -- five hours of hell, Charley judges -- and stay in a traditional ryokan, most interesting to both of them for its extraordinary hot and cold-water toilet. Charley is actually far more dogged than his father in sticking to Japanese food, though they both end up with relief in Mister Donut long before the book ends.
At the heart of Wrong About Japan is a comic juxtaposition of Carey senior's desire to see Japanese manga and anime as representing such things as the isolation of the modern individual in a post-industrial society or a contemporary manifestation of classical samurai traditions, and the totally different views of their actual Japanese creators and, needless to say, Charley.
The idea of the fundamental inscrutability to Westerners of things Japanese is as old as Western books about Japan themselves. Films, too, have often taken the same line, as Lost in Translation recently demonstrated. Carey's approach is therefore nothing new. Nevertheless his presentation of himself as the less intelligent one in many of his encounters is an effective ironic device that sustains the book's interest. It's only Carey senior who turns out to be almost continuously "wrong about Japan."
RSS