WRONG ABOUT JAPAN. By Peter Carey. 158pp. Faber. £12.99. 0 571 22407 5
It is rare, and refreshing, for a book's title to admit that its aim has failed.
But when the author is Peter Carey, the Australia-born, New York resident novelist, two-time Booker Prize winner, stylistic virtuoso and master of the assumed voice, we are put on guard. Was he really wrong about Japan, which he visited with his twelve-year-old son Charley in 2002? If so, why tell us? Or is his title a writer's ruse, to persuade us to read on? Read on.
As he relates, Carey has in recent years made many trips to see his translator in Japan, where his books have found a wide audience. Inevitably his writer's curiosity was caught by manga, "random sketches", the ubiquitous comic books sold, scanned, and left like newspapers on train seats -even in these tense economic times. Japanese buy, flip through and discard some two billion manga a year. Manga range from syrupy adventures of saucer-eyed children -Eastern equivalents of The Wind in the Willows -to comics for childish adults depicting sex in images of rape, bondage and sado-masochism, furtively read by weary Japanese office workers on the long commute home to wife, kids and mortgage.
With their startling perspectives, plotless speed and grotesque characters, manga preserve, by way of nineteenth-century woodblock prints, one of the world's oldest artistic traditions, descending unbroken from eighth-century Buddhist devotional drawings. Inevitably they have inspired animated cartoon films -anime in Japanese -wildly popular in Japan, and beginning to find followers abroad. One was young Charley Carey, who discovered manga in book and
DVD form in the Japanese shops around Grand Central Station in New York.
Carey's idea was to take Charley on his next trip to Tokyo and to use him as a key to "enter the mansion of Japanese culture through its garish, brightly lit back door". Charley agreed, with a proviso (today's kids bargain, in New York as in Tokyo): "No real Japan. You've got to promise. No temples. No museums".
This sounds like what a wary novelist's son (or novelist) might say. Carey pere prepared himself by reading new books, mostly by foreigners, about Japan; Carey fils watched DVDs. School holidays arrived, a publisher came up with air tickets, father and son set forth, Carey Sr with a notebook of questions about Japanese artistic ideas, motivations and such. So far, so good. The team booked into a ryokan, a Japanese-style inn in a tourist-tormented quarter of Tokyo, with traditional tatami-mat floor, futon-quilts and nowhere to stow their Austro-American-size suitcases. Predictably, they tittered at their Japanese en suite toilet. Manhattan plumbing is not exactly paleolithic, but the Japanese variety, with warm air drying derrieres and fountains gushing hand-wash water are triumphs of sanitary technology, and have nothing in common with the Real Japan.
When Charley demurred they skipped the communal bath, although this involves no more than exposing private parts to other males, their multisex prototypes having been banished to remote provinces. Carey Sr's notebook began to fill with observations that, as his title concedes, are often wrong. Japanese sleeping in cardboard boxes with their shoes neatly ranged outside are not drunk, but homeless; Japan has no public betting shops (he may have misread the establishments where the material prizes from pachinko (pinball) parlours are brazenly, and illegally, traded for cash); anime is not from French, but Japanese and gaijin ("outside (country) person") does not connote barbarian, but white-skinned foreigner. Carey says he knew more about Japan before he left New York: words both disarming and over-(or mock-) modest.
As his father had hoped, Charley's vision proved more perceptive, although not perhaps as Carey expected. They had the help of Takashi, a mysterious Japanese friend Charley had made on the internet. This may sound like another novelist's device, but I recall meeting such ethereal beings when touring Japan with my own children. One of Charley's dreams was fulfilled when they met Yoshiyuki Tomino, the creator of Mobile Suits Gundam -giant, nuclear-powered robots piloted by children who tramp the earth with superhuman powers. Carey Sr advanced a theory that the Mobile Suits could be a metaphorical empowerment of a Japan crushed by atomic weapons. Tomino-San pondered. "Gundam was launched just to sell toy robots," he explained through a friendly interpreter, "to create a product that people would buy. There is no real inspiration behind it." Inscrutable wisdom of the Orient? Keen business know-how? Both? Carey cannot tell. By this time they have given up on Japanese rice, fish and pickles, and are breakfasting at Mister Donut, like a proper Japanese family.
