plorentz's Full Review: Peter Carey - Wrong About Japan
There's a lovely cinematic moment at the end of Tim Burton's film Ed Wood in which the hopelessly misunderstood, but irrepressibly ambitious titular b-movie film director has a chance meeting with his much more celebrated (and then not) hero Orson Welles; a brief conversation with God, so to speak, that reveals both Wood's naive misunderstanding of the man, but also the great, touching similarities between the two.
Novelist Peter Carey's recent travel memoir Wrong About Japan winds its way through a series of encounters and growing frustrations toward another such unlikely meeting between the God and the zealous pilgrim.
When Carey's 12-year-old son Charley took an almost obsessive interest in Japanese comic books, or manga, and the anime films that they'd evolved into, Carey did what any normal parent would do. He nurtured that interest, and even let himself be led by his son's enthusiasm, studying up on the Japanese animation phenomenon, and subsequently on the the Japanese storytelling traditions and culture from which the animation emerged, developing his own hypotheses about the connections between Japanese history and anime itself with an armchair scholar's wide-eyed-and-ignorant determination. So much so that he proposes a trip to Japan with his son, to meet with, interview, and have the pictures taken with several of the various artists associated with manga and anime production.
Okay, so maybe Carey didn't do what any normal Dad would. And maybe Wrong About Japan can't be simply labeled as a "travel memoir". In fact, at various times, the book feels like novel, an anthropological study, a piece of investigative journalism, and a brief fan's-eye essay of anime and manga. Carey might have limited his attention to the subject at hand, but this book is as much about Carey and his relationship with his son - those infuriatingly inescapable generational disconnects - as it is about his naive-but-absolutely-understandable-and-well-informed cultural hypotheses and the way they're obliterated with each subsequent meeting and interview.
How depressing, but somehow familiar it feels when Carey learns from the creator of one of his favorite mangas that the series - which Carey had imbued with so much historical and sociological weight - was created as nothing more than a commercial vehicle - a product designed to get kids to buy more toy robots.
Equally familiar (though somehow reassuring) are Carey's depictions of his own concerns as a father, when, upon arriving in Japan, his son wants nothing more than to find the gigantic video arcade he'd heard about. Also, much to Carey's surprise, his son has been communicating with a Japanese youth who calls himself "Takashi" over the internet and has made arrangements to meet up with him.
Every time Carey thinks he's learned something about anything - whether it's the origin of manga, the exact meaning and etymological background of the word otaku (to oversimplify: a reference to a manga hobbyist), whether it's his own son's wishes or interests - his studied ruminations are obliterated with sympathetic looks and condescending of-course-you-would-think-that's.
Throughout the book, we the reader feel Carey's pain - from his boyish enthusiasm upon arrival to his increasing exasperation with always being off-base, always feeling ignorant, always being the insensitive gaijin, never quite knowing what he's learning - or if he's learning anything at all - always being on the wrong side of a language barrier. Carey writes all of this in a straightforward, conversational style which makes for a brisk, enjoyable read; and at a compact 150 pages, it never lags or outstays its welcome.
I should also mention that from a graphics standpoint, Wrong About Japan boasts a thrillingly elegant design, with extensive reproductions of Japanese graphics bookending the text as well as at the start of each chapter, all annotated at the end. Combined with Carey's insightful observations of the Japanese artform (no matter how far-out he was sometimes made to believe these observations were), the book made me - an anime ignoramus - want to rush out and check this stuff out. A fun, touching read.
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