Faber £12.99 pp158

Charley Carey is a 12-year-old whose understanding of Japan has been shaped by his passion for anime — Japanese animated cartoons, and their print equivalent, manga. He is also extremely shy. His father, the Booker prize-winning novelist Peter Carey, sees this passion for Japan as a way of encouraging Charley to be more outgoing. Together in New York, father and son watch anime (pronounced anim-ay), read books and eat sushi until the day when Charley announces that he would like to live in Toyko. Carey isn’t about to relocate. But he does recognise that “the kid who would never talk in class was now brimming with new ideas he wasn’t shy to discuss”, so he suggests they go to Japan for a holiday. Charley is underwhelmed by the offer, until Carey agrees they will not look for the father’s “real” Japan. Instead they will approach the country on Charley’s terms: through anime and manga.

Carey then lines up meetings and interviews with the people who work in the industry. Wham! Bam!! Kabooooom!!! (Fast-forward to the streets of Tokyo.) Despite his agreement with Charley, Carey arrives in Japan with a head full of clichés about what constitutes the real Japan: bathhouses, tea ceremonies, geishas, ritual suicide and Kabuki theatre all feature. He is, he discovers during the course of his stay, wrong about most things. But unlike Bob Harris, the Bill Murray character in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, who realises he is not going to gain any great insights into Japanese culture and heads for the bar and the attractions of a younger woman, Carey looks instead to Charley.

This is, of course, a one-sided account; Charley, no doubt, would have described the trip in very different terms. But Carey appears not to have talked up his role, and shows himself constantly being proved wrong in his assumptions, as for instance when he goes to visit the country’s most revered sword maker. Carey has read about the sacred nature of the craft and how each sword must be finished in moonlight. The reality proves to be more prosaic, and moonlight is now replaced by the gloom of late afternoon in the suburbs. He is equally misguided when he chooses a restaurant that turns out to be a brothel. Not for the last time, he admits to finding the Japanese perplexing. Charley, on the other hand, comes with few assumptions or prejudices and suffers fewer surprises.

Carey describes the father-son relationship with great dexterity and open-eyed tenderness. But he is most interesting when he writes about anime and manga, which accounts for some 40% of all magazines sold in Japan. He and Charley tour studios where cartoons are drawn and edited, speak to the people who conceive and market them, and marvel at the cult that they stimulate, personified by Charley’s Japanese cyber-friend, who appears at their hotel in knee-length boots, a Mao jacket and spiked hair, a perfect replica of the anime character Mobile Suit Gundam.

But while we in Britain regard cartoons as escapism and mere entertainment, the Japanese find them an extremely effective forum for questioning values and examining history. Carey is in his element here, whether considering the significance of animism in vintage anime films, listening to accounts of the firebombing of Tokyo at the end of the second world war, or marvelling at a city that seems to have adopted so many western habits but has yet to take to its languages. And with every discovery, he finds his assumptions proved wrong. The Japanese critic Kosei Ono could have been writing of the difference between Carey and Charley’s approach to Japan when he warns that, “Half knowledge is sometimes much worse than complete ignorance”.

The mysteries of Japan and father-son relationships prove to be rich subjects, especially for a writer at the peak of his powers, and they make for an entertaining and uplifting book. Carey has not plotted it as tightly as his novels, but there is still progression — Charley comes out of himself, Carey comes to terms with a country and a people that he had misconceived and the reader learns that there is more to cartoons than Walt Disney and the Beano. The result is neither memoir nor travel book, but one of those hybrids that can so easily go wrong, but that here goes life-affirmingly right. Wrong about Japan, then, but correct about the effect it would have on his son and the fascination his account would provide for readers.

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