WRONG ABOUT JAPAN

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 père 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 Snr 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 derrières 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 Snr’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 Snr 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.

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 Snr 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.

From the TLS