It Will Always Be Right Now, And Then The Future Comes
REVIEW: Wrong About Japan: A Father's Journey With His Son by Peter Carey
When I first thought of writing something about Peter Carey’s memoir Wrong About Japan, a few chapters in, my working title for the review was “The Worst Book of All Time?”. No book that I could recall had anything like what I saw at the time as Carey’s pretension and dullheadedness. What was the point of this book anyway?
Here’s the premise: on finding his twelve-year-old son Charley developing an interest in anime and manga, Carey, though skeptical at first, soon joins in Charley’s enthusiasm. They search the comic book shops for rare Akira manga volumes together, they watch Grave of the Fireflies. Before long, they’re planning a father-son trip to Japan.
Carey is a successful novelist, a two-time winner of the Booker prize, and so through his publishing connections he arranges for interviews with the manga artists Charley likes, as well as some other famous figures. Charley is excited to get autographs and pictures to show to friends at school, but Carey sees the trip as a chance for a more intellectual investigation into Japanese culture. He’s been reading up on Japanese history and art, and he relishes the chance to test his pet theories about Japan with experts in their fields. Each chapter of the book, then, is either an interview or a tourist experience, and each demonstrates this perplexity of purposes between father and son.
This setup is a little odd. Is this just something successful publishing world people do — travel and presume they’ll get access to other famous and successful people? Or is there something we’re missing? We could speculate that Carey proposed this trip to his publisher and got them to pay for it, promising a book would come out of it, but we’re never filled in.
We start to find that the book is always reticent like this: events and exchanges come across as contrived even as they play at straightforwardness. Whose idea was this, really? Who liked Japan first? Do father and son get along, are they close? They both seem to be there for love of the same thing, they share ideas and recommendations, and yet at other times Carey seems not to “get it” at all. He seems worried, distracted by something almost alien in his son, something he feels he has to watch over and interrogate.
When father and son get to Japan, they meet Charley’s online friend Takashi, and so a real alien arrives —
… I saw, by the wide doorway to the lane, in front of the antique calligraphic banner and beside the picturesque sake barrels, the most singular boy…
This must be Takashi, I did not doubt it.
In Tokyo’s Harajuku district one can see those perfect Japanese Michael Jacksons, no hair out of place, and punk rockers whose punkness is detailed so fastidiously that they achieve a polished hyper-reality… His eyes were large and round, glistening with an emotion that, while seemingly transparent, was totally alien to me…
Takashi is fifteen, a few years older than Charley. He loves anime and manga like Charley does, and Carey complains about Charley texting him too much. Takashi likes to show them around and give them advice about Japan. He even begs to come along to the interviews with the artists and celebrities, but Carey never lets him.
Whenever Takashi appears, Carey gets blocked out from his son, starts getting befuddled. “Who is he? … What is he?” he asks a publishing colleague who joins them for a later part of the trip, and he even says at one point: “Is he gay, do you think?”. And so maybe my review title should be I Think My Son Is a Weeb, And I’m Worried1, with accompanying smallminded concerns about manliness, etc.. Carey seems to be saying to himself: “The long road of dorkdom beckons for Charley! What's a father to do?” Or, at least, this is one implication hovering in the book’s restrained atmosphere. It's hard to tell how to take it.
This gets stranger after some easy Wikipedia research — Takashi, it turns out, is fictional2. This helps explain his unreality, or maybe we should say his "hyper-reality", and so resolves some of the weirdness of his presence. He never seemed plausible anyway, and is better understood as an anime character come-to-life amidst real people. Carey never lets on that Takashi is a fake, even though he does come off as somewhat shoddily conceived and so you might suspect it anyway. But then, if Takashi is a cartoon, what’s he doing in a memoir?
The real story of this book, then, is one of a father watching over his son’s passage out of adolescence, but told through stoic travelogue and oddly mute comic scenes, mixing real and fake, telling and not telling. There is a riddling quality to what Carey chooses to divulge or not. Why tell us so exhaustively of his baffled attempts at interviewing a master swordsmith, getting every question wrong, and then leave out almost every detail of the final interview of the book, which might have been the most important?
We are merely allowed to be present as the events pass on, and we watch father and son in each chapter. Sometimes they are close and the son is recognizable as a continuation of the father, and then other times they look askance at each other and hardly know what to say. “You are a different species”, he says to his son half-jokingly, and Charley replies that he has indeed “mutated”.
I never quite found the book funny, but my early dislike of it started to wane somewhere around the interview with the writer “Mr. Yazaki” (another fake?), whose story of a childhood in wartime Japan is probably the longest episode in the book. Even in this quiet book, this is something even more quiet and difficult — especially alongside anime hairdos and space robots — but it’s something Carey feels his son must know. Charley’s reaction to the story is omitted.
The rewards of this book, then, are surprising, and in its curious way it grows more estimable as we proceed, and then more so in retrospect. Beneath the wandering interviews and the awkward exchanges, Carey gathers talismans of inscrutable epiphany whose meanings are hidden by the book’s enormous reserve. Somehow he manages to write a mundane and fairly unfunny travelogue that on a second look is seen to be loaded with symbolic richness.
In casting himself as so bumbling, Carey reaches at something essential about encountering a foreign country — perhaps Japan especially — but also about parenthood. He arrives in Japan full of knowledge and insight from his reading, has many questions and is peskily forward with his interview subjects. But all his meetings are oblique, all his discoveries only whisper. Wisdom is found only in meandering and silence, and then all this is made stranger the more we wonder which parts, if any, really happened.
In the book’s climax, they watch My Neighbor Totoro with Carey’s architect friend Kenji. Through some travel accidents, they end up watching the movie in Kenji’s office, and the book more or less describes its purpose and technique in a throwaway description:
“Perhaps,” Kenji said, “we could watch it in my office,” but I could see he was worried about this too, possibly because this venue might appear less hospitable than he would like.
In the end, however, this is exactly where we found ourselves, although the “office” hardly describes a space so conspicuously empty of anything that would identify itself as such. I don’t mean to suggest it was minimalist, only that it was unusually large and there was nothing much in it. Was there a mystery here? I seriously doubt it, although this is how it is with travelling — the simplest things take on an air of great inscrutability and so many questions arise, only to be half born and then lost as they are bumped aside by others. The most mundane events take on the character of deep secrets.
This is to prepare for their interview with the great Hayao Miyazaki, which will be the crown of the trip.
But once they get there none of the interview is actually described. Carey only shows us Miyazaki sharing flipbooks and drawings with father and son, with no language between them. That’s all. The scene lasts for just a few paragraphs. Did it even happen? It is yet another quiet moment of technical daring in this deceptively simple book.
The book is wise about an obliquity in parenthood, which has a mystery into which we are constantly inquiring, or seem to be stumbling around. Child and parent meet, and in this first meeting they are already overdetermined. They are so stubbornly themselves that, as time passes, they seem only to go further down their own paths. What the other does makes no difference — and yet they live through each other. Though silent, the interdependence is absolute.
Each can only say what the other needs to hear at a diagonal, and it is somehow always this way even when they both recognize this is so. It is always this way because it is like this right now, and it will be the same tomorrow, when everything will have changed.
_The True History of the Kelly Gang_ is a book I think about often. All of Carey's books have Wikipedia pages except this one. Perhaps you could write it given your deep reading. This inspires me to read more recent Carey.
Fantastic essay.