All Intensive Purposes

With all the posting hereabouts on Haruki Murakami of late, you might conclude that the reason I picked up Peter Carey's Wrong About Japan: A Father's Journey With His Son is that I'm on a Japan kick. While there's some truth to that, Peter Carey is one of a relatively short list of authors whose latest I will invariably acquire. Murakami is another, as are Thomas Pynchon and Alan Furst. Rick Bass used to be this list, but his polemics depress me, as much as I agree with him.

Carey built his reputation with his fiction, but this is the second time in the last few years that he has published something more like travel writing. His earlier book of this sort, 30 Days in Sydney: A Wildly Distorted Account, was an expat's particular view of his old home town (Carey lives in New York City now). It was idiosyncratic and informed, and I quite enjoyed it. Wrong About Japan is as slender as that book was, but it finds Carey on unfamiliar turf, and with less to say as our guide.

Carey's twelve-year-old son is a fan of anime and manga, and so the two of them hatch a plan to travel to Tokyo for some cartoon tourism. By the end of the book, the elder Carey has learned enough to flesh out a magazine article, say -- make that a magazine article for those of us who don't know much about anime, either. Carey travels to Japan with his own preoccupations -- swords, Kabuki and WWII -- and much of the book marches from those to the inevitable realization that anime is just as worthy a prism through which to glimpse Japan as these better-known tropes. To my surprise, Carey is not the reporter to make much out of the sources and places he finds -- too often, he laments that his notes are indecipherable, or that he forgot someone's name. As a variant of the "Mysterious East" genre, this is surely inoffensive, but hardly very satisfying. The most compelling character, Takashi, a teen-aged anime fan befriended on-line by Carey's son, turns out to be a fictional creation, according to an interview Carey gave to Publisher's Weekly (via Powell's).

Wrong About Japan ends with a touch of grace, but I still found it not just slender, but slight. I wished Carey had shown us even more of Takashi, so I guess I await his return to longer fiction.


(Not that I've likely inspired you to purchase Wrong About Japan, but if you follow the links in the titles above to Amazon, you can help defray the costs of this site by purchasing Carey's books there.)