The summit of the father-and-son expedition is reached at an against-all-odds meeting with Hayao Miyazaki, genius of the anime, often called the Walt Disney of Japan although his Spirited Away, in speed, dazzling technique and explosive imaginativeness makes Uncle Walt's most ambitious work, Snow White, seem ordinary.

Through its brilliance, however, the durable manga conventions are seen -a cute little girl who deploys shy innocence against the monstrous machinations of an adult world obsessed with greed and gluttony, the ancient religious symbols, ghosts, demons and freaks that haunt Japanese children's bedtimes -just as in Stagecoach we can still see a child's game of good and bad guys riding an eternal range. No wonder Spirited Away was a world hit with both children and adults, and won an Academy Award in 2002.

The summit meeting was not wordy. Miyazaki has almost no English, the Careys no Japanese. The only words in Charley's critical vocabulary are "bor-ring!" and "cool!". Carey Sr had no way of asking about motivation or philosophy. Instead, Miyazaki confirmed an old insight -a great artist combines a child's imagination with an adult's skills -by showing Charley a book of flip-through moving images based on kamishibai, the "paper theatre" long used by Japanese street vendors to attract children and sell them sweets. Despite his title, Carey has found a world far more mysterious than any real Japan -the prepubescent years before sex has reared its baffling head, the magic land we all passed through and can never revisit, except by art. Charley and Miyazaki closed their encounter with a cool contact of closed fists and a treasured photograph; the anime maestro returned to his drawing board, the explorers to New York. Like his book's title, Carey's family portrait of a cool son and his middle-aged dad who never quite gets it is another literary device, and both work. Peter Carey manages to get quite a few things right about Japan, too. Not bad, in a short school holiday.