Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey

I heard about this book on CBC radio, in an interview with the author, Peter Carey, and I’ve wanted to read it ever since. I found a copy of it at Zoinks, a used bookstore I just discovered (on Bloor Street, between Christie and Ossington, for other Toronto residents.)

It’s non-fiction, for a change: a travel diary about Carey’s trip to Japan with his twelve-year-old son Charley. It’s short, but engagingly written. Carey promises his son that they won’t go looking for the “Real Japan” - things like temples, museums, and tea ceremonies - but he spends a lot of the trip trying to find hidden cultural and historical meaning Japanese pop culture. But as everyone he interviews keeps telling him, he’s wrong about Japan.

There’s a pretty good review of the book in the Christian Science Monitor:

As father and son return to New York, they seem to have achieved one of Peter’s goals, a better rapport with his son. But Peter’s own conclusion that, for all its modernity, Japan remains inaccessible to outsiders, sounds like a tired cliché.

The saving grace of his story is that it is not shared by Charley.

Cross-cultural connections by Takashi Oka, Christian Science Monitor.

I agree with the reviewer for the most part, but I don’t think that Carey is saying what he thinks he is. It seemed to me that Carey’s conclusions about the impenetrability of Japanese culture had more to do with his own fixation on finding the “real meaning” behind anime and manga, rather than any general inaccessibility to Westerners.

I gave the book a B+. It would have been more, but it felt a bit short to me, even though I enjoyed it a lot. I think the book might have been better if Carey had given a more complete account of their whole trip, rather than focusing on just a very few experiences. The things he had to say about anime and manga were really interesting, though. Definitely a worthwhile read.

Tags: Peter Carey