There is something about the compartmentalisation of the Japanese subway kiosk that adds to its significance as an unintended museum of contemporary culture in all its glories, vagaries and indignities. There is a delicate order to the hierarchy of publications, whether they be manga or magazines, and to the rows of packaged products whose aesthetic refinement make the content irrelevant. Who needs to eat Pocky (chocolate-coated pretzel sticks) when each pack is a Warholian masterpiece? And why bother attempting to open the exquisite Muscat Gummy sachet when solidified, if faintly fragrant, industrial gunk is all that awaits?

And so it is with Peter Carey’s Wrong About Japan, which recounts a journey the author took in the company of his 12-year-old son, Charley, in part to understand Charley’s fascination with manga and anime. An eye-catching cover, an author whose sentences generally flow with more creativity than the bookish babbling of John Updike and friends, and a subject — fathoming the supposedly unfathomable Japanese sensibility — that should be as revealing about the West as it intends to be about the “inscrutable” East. Yet this thin volume is, at 158 pages with a fair few illustrations in between, too long, too laboured and a little too loving. Two characters disrupt the traditional Carey flow. There is Charley, and there is his “imaginary” friend, Takashi, first encountered online and then in the flesh. The latter is intended to embody the contradictions of the author’s real experiences, but is an industrial confection with all the inedibility of Muscat Gummy.

We are witness to that slightly embarrassing moment of an author coming to terms with a foreign land, his son, and seemingly writing about the experience in a manner as compelling to his pre-teenage offspring as to the broader audience for whom the work has presumably been released. In that sense, it is a work of emotional vanity that could be retitled “The Wrong Way to Write about Japan”. It is a book that second-rate sociologists might characterise as “very Japanese ” in that its tatemae (surface) is clearly unrepresentative of the honne, the core truth.

Inevitably, most writing about manga and anime, the moving picture form of same, grapples with Japaneseness and the country’s enduring self-image that its people are uniquely unique. That self- image was central to the rise of prewar fascism, played a more benevolent role in the postwar striving to rebuild the country and has hindered Japan’s attempts to capitalise on that success by expanding its global influence. If your character is defined by difference, then empathy is, by definition, virtually impossible.

There are many thoughtful Japanese who question this prevailing, potentially corrupting belief, nihonjinron, but when you disembark at Narita airport and are surrounded by the inevitably polite, somewhat superficial conversations that characterise the occasional visit, the first layer of misunderstanding — and it is a thick layer — is that you will never be able to comprehend “the Japanese”. That is your role, your cultural compartment, not necessarily, as is often blandly interpreted, to ensure that the myth remains a mystery but almost for the benefit of your own identity. You may not know where you are but you will always know who you are in Japan.

Carey invests Takashi with too much of this uniqueness, though he captures the compartmentalisation of character that should suggest to the average visitor, if not the average reader, that there are levels of personality at play, which, stripped back, may very well reveal a fairly ordinary human being at centre. It is, of course, true that the Japanese have a wonderfully imaginative tradition of comic books whose creators are rightly national living treasures and it is also true that many of the comic books read on the Japanese subway are pornographic, puerile gomi (garbage).

We are fortunate to have an author of Peter Carey’s quality willing to write about such personal and difficult subjects as the inscrutability of the young, but he has to write for us and trust that his children will have the good sense to appreciate the originality and worth of his work at some later moment of their lives. The simultaneous translation of an emotional travelogue for both son and universal audience was a mistake. Japan, the country, was merely an innocent bystander.

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