Together they meet Yoshiyuki Tomino, director of Mobile Suit Gundam, one of Charley's favorite dramas, and Hiroyuki Kitakubo, creator of Blood, The Last Vampire. The latter is described as looking like "an underprivileged kid who had grown up drawing manga by the light of an open refrigerator door." There is a nice picture at the end of the book of him and Charley connecting clenched fists, nonetheless.
The most absorbing chapter is an account by an informant identified only as "Mr Yazaki" of the US firebombing of his home town in 1944. American forces all but destroyed many Japanese cities by conventional bombing in the months running up to the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and Carey, who laudably wants something anti-war in the book, introduces the topic by reference to a classic anime movie, Isao Takahata's Grave of the Fireflies.
Charley's ally is a Japanese boy of his own age, Takashi, who he has contacted beforehand on the Internet. Takashi's teenage elegance -- hair that stands up in triangular sections, a high-necked blue jacket with gold buttons, knee-high boots -- both overawes Carey senior and allows him to make the boy a slightly sad figure. At the last moment, for instance, he proves too shy to accompany the Careys to meet some of his greatest idols.
At a deeper level, however, Carey is making fun of himself. He crafts his own character into that of a befuddled, baffled and old-fashioned father figure, mumbling on about novels and films of the 1940s and 1950s when the artists he meets, and his son, too, are only interested in the newest cultural creations.
The potentially profound idea that artists have more in common with the young than with their contemporaries is offered only by implication. Peter Carey is presumably aware of it but hides the knowledge to allow the comic aspects of the situation to take effect.
The book ends with the two Careys meeting the great Hayao Miyazaki, director of Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away. As they part company, Miyazaki says that he believes humanity's imagination is its most precious possession and that it can create either virtue or weapons capable of destroying all life. At last Peter Carey and somebody famous and Japanese appear to have found an opinion they can share.
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