Home > Travel > Asia > Wrong about Japan

Wrong about Japan: A Father's Journey with His Son

List Price: $11.95

Save 10.0%

You Pay: $10.76

Want this eBook?Our eBook Library Software is required to purchase and download eBooks. Download it here.

Tell a Friend

Overview

When Peter Carey offered to take his son to Japan, 12-year-old Charley stipulated no temples or museums. He wanted to see manga, anime, and cool, weird stuff. His father said yes. Out of that bargain comes this enchanting tour of the mansion of Japanese culture, as entered through its garish, brightly lit back door.

Guided-and at times judged-by an ineffably strange boy named Takashi, the Careys meet manga artists and anime directors, the meticulous impersonators called "visualists," and solitary, nerdish otaku. Throughout, the Booker Prize-winning novelist makes observations that are intriguing even when-as his hosts keep politely reminding him-they turn out to be wrong. Funny, surprising, distinguished by its wonderfully nuanced portrait of a father and son thousands of miles from home, Wrong About Japan is a delight.

Editorial Reviews

Novelist Carey is a two-time Booker Prize winner (Oscar and Lucinda; True History of the Kelly Gang), and although his latest work is presented as nonfiction, his fiction readers won't be disappointed. This travel diary reads like a scintillating novella, and Carey has, in fact, added his own fictional embellishments to the real-life events he reports. After his shy 12-year-old son, Charley, began reading English translations of Japanese manga, their Saturday mornings at the Manhattan comic book store Forbidden Planet spurred Carey's own interest. As their "cultural investigation" of manga and anime widened, "the kid who would never talk in class was now brimming with new ideas he wasn't shy to discuss." This father-son bond deepened when they flew to Japan to meet manga artists and anime directors, including Yoshiyuki Tomino (Mobile Suit Gundam). At publisher Kodansha, they learned of manga's history, and touring Studio Ghibli, they encountered the "most famous anime director in the world," Hayao Miyazaki (Spirited Away). Their guide to Tokyo's cartoon culture was Takashi, a teenager the narrative says Charley met online (yet, as Carey revealed in a newspaper interview, he created the imaginary character of Takashi because the narrative needed conflict, and Carey wanted to avoid "conflict with anybody in real life"). Carey's fluid and engaging writing style gets a boost from 25 energetic b&w anime/manga illustrations.
Copyright (c) Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Author Information

Bio of Peter Carey

Born in Bacchus Marsh, a country town in the southern state of Victoria, in 1943, Peter Carey has put his Australian background to good use. Yet, even though he consistently writes about Australia, he is far from a regionalist. His writing is marked by its wit, flights of imagination, clear style, solid characterization, and rich texture. He brings to all his fiction a cosmopolitan quality and metaphysical dimension that has led critics to compare his work with that of Jorge Luis Borges Jorge and Gabriel Garcia Marquez. When asked about the debt to Borges, Carey replied: "It is there, it cannot not be there." Carey's first volume of short fiction, The Fat Man in History (1974), with its original and unrealistic use of Australian materials, gained immediate acclaim in Australia. One critic noted that Carey at last fills "a vacancy in the Sophisticated Fantasy Section of the Short Story Industry." A second book of stories, War Crimes (1979), was equally well received and won an important Australian literary award. His first novel, Bliss, appeared in 1982. At the time Carey was balancing his writing career with the operation of an advertising agency in Sydney, and his books were not generally known outside of Australia. When Illywhacker was published, in 1985, followed by British and American editions, he began to receive international attention. The novel, whose title employs an Australian slang word for con artist, retells Australian history and looks into the nation's future, stressing all the while the lies that constitute the national myth; the work was short-listed for the British Booker Prize. Carey's next novel, Oscar and Lucinda (1988), did receive that prestigious prize, and his reputation as an Australian writer with international stature was firmly established. In 1989 he moved to New York, where he still lives, teaching part time at New York University and writing. Even though The Tax Inspector (1992) was written in New York, it continue s Carey's exploration of the Australian myth and its effect on the individual. Yet all of Carey's work transcends the Australian experience. 020

Customer Reviews

There are no customer reviews available at this time. To add your review, Register or Sign In to your account using our free eBook Library Software.

Additional Info

Imprint

Vintage

Filesize

2.73 MB

Number of Pages

176

eBook ISBN

9780307549716

Excerpt from: Wrong about Japan by Peter Carey

I was at the video shop with my twelve-year-old son when he rented Kikujiro, a tough-guy/little-boy Japanese film whose charming, twitching hoodlum is played by an actor named Beat Takeshi. How could I have known where this would lead? Over the next few weeks Charley rented Kikujiro a number of times, and although I was with him when he did so I had no idea how powerfully he’d been affected, not until he said, quietly, en passant, “When I grow up I’m going to live in Tokyo.” Charley is a shy boy, and later I wondered if he had glimpsed a country where his own character might be seen as admirable. Whether this was true or not, his silent passion for Japan soon broadened, inflamed not only by Kikujiro but a whole range of other stimuli. I don’t mean that he lay in bed at night reading Tanizaki or Basho. That would finally be my fate. He was twelve years old. It was the year before Iraq, before he discovered punk rock, NoFX, and Anti-Flag. He and his friends skateboarded. They had Xboxes and GameCubes and PlayStation 2s, and although he read for half an hour a night, he set the timer for exactly thirty minutes and closed the book the instant that it rang. What he then picked up were English translations of Japanese comic books. These came from stores inhabited by pimply youths sporting green hair and staples in their heads. Forbidden Planet is on lower Broadway, walking distance from our house, and I would accompany him there on Saturday mornings. Although I knew that Japanese comics were called manga, I would have said that a comic was a comic no matter what you named it. At Forbidden Planet I slowly began to understand that I was wrong. The first and most obvious difference in Japanese comics is the broadness of subject matter, from saccharine stories featuring little big-eyed girls to the dense and serious works of Osamu Tezuka, although this is not something one discovers in a single Saturday morning. What was immediately obvious was the startlingly graphic nature of manga which, in its clarity of line and dramatic blocky forms, echoed the Japanese wood-block prints of the nineteenth century. Charley and I were soon drifting uptown where, around Grand Central, we found places where the entire English language had been vaporised. Here, in stores catering to Japanese exiles, the graphic nature of manga was more dramatically apparent. Gone were the wordier English translations. Instead, we saw bold hieroglyphics stamped with two or three characters that could be read, although not by us, as unthinkingly as a traffic light. Charley soon became interested in a comic-book series called Akira—although a comic book is a skinny little thing, whereas a manga has an altogether different heft. Akira would finally run to six volumes with one-inch spines, and I remember how we walked for mile after weary mile in search of a store where the punk-faced slackers might have finally unpacked what we both knew was in their basement: freshly delivered cartons of Akira #6. Sometimes I was the censor but more often was delighted by artists I never would have discovered if not for my preternaturally tall, crew-cut son. While I never read Akira as attentively as he did, I looked closely enough to understand that it dealt with motorcycle gangs in Neo-Tokyo many years after an atomic devastation. Akira was the name of an immense, malevolent apocalyptic device or person—both, actually—that still lay dormant at the centre of the city. On Akira’s graphic pages I found images so artful that I could imagine hanging them on my wall. Akira, born as manga, had also been made into an animated film which, being Japanese, is not called a cartoon but an anime. It is easy to see why this form should deserve its own label, although less easy to explain why the name is French. Certainly it differs