Travel: A diverting tale o n a rare subject - relatives enjoying being together. Joseph O'Connor reviews Wrong About Japan: A Father's Journey With His Son, by Peter Carey.
Peter Carey's latest offering, Wrong About Japan, is a willowy little thing, weighing in at 158 smaller-than-average pages. The cover, a vivid composition in heart-attack pink, pays homage to the Japanese animation styles of manga and anime. It was an interest in these frequently gory genres that led Carey and his 12-year-old son, Charley, to visit the country; although the latter insisted he would only tag along if there was "no real Japan" on the itinerary: no temples, tea pavilions or kabuki theatres. This skinny publication is dad's chronicle of the jaunt.
Carey sees beyond the clamorous bling-land of pachinko arcades and robot obsessives so ambiguously imagined in the film Lost in Translation. True, his vision includes by now customary elements: gangsters and Godzilla fans, comic strips aplenty, "punk rockers whose punkness is detailed so fastidiously that they achieve a polished hyper-reality". But somehow surviving the neon delirium are descendants of the culture's richer traditions: perceptive storytellers, sumo wrestlers working in sushi bars, sword-makers who "in deference to their neighbours restrict their hammering and folding of steel to the hours between nine and five on weekdays".
The book is handsomely ornamented, not to say conspicuously padded, with an assortment of graphics and arresting cartoons. It is probably the only volume yet published by a Booker prize-winner to feature the word "KABOOOOM" emblazoned across its frontispiece: a surprisingly explosive overture for a fairly subtle work.
Carey is one of the most consistently brilliant novelists now writing, but there is little enough here to thrill admirers of his facility for luminous characterisation and electrifyingly audacious prose. Some who relished Oscar and Lucinda and The True History of the Kelly Gang may feel a bit underwhelmed by this enjoyable if brief essay on what Peter and Charley did on their holidays. Its publisher would call it succinct, but it may be just short. Granted, economy of expression is itself a Japanese ideal, and Carey professes himself a lover of the haiku form. But as punk-poet John Cooper Clarke once observed, to express oneself in 17 syllables is very difficult.
To be fair, though, amplitude isn't the aim of the book, and it would be stupid to review it harshly for not being what it doesn't pretend to be.
Wrong About Japan reveals a different facet of Carey's writing: the prose is less of a high-wire performance, but still supple, sensuous and deeply alluring. There's a gorgeous nonchalance, a tranquil fluidity. The tone is sometimes journalistic, in the old-fashioned, literal sense: parts of the travelogue almost read like extracts from a diary, unmediated by much of a desire to polish them into art. Fans of Carey's astonishing formal dexterity may expect him to subvert the conventions of the writerly travel tome, the better to say something breathtakingly original or strange. If that doesn't happen a lot, it doesn't really matter. Before long, you start feeling you're a fellow traveller on the trip, as the rhythms of the book begin to coax you in.
The affable bickerings between lad and dad are funny. Charley's engagement with the new surroundings is recounted beguilingly. The boy comes across as a pleasant, indeed a remarkably wise travelling companion, on one occasion advising his unwitting parent that the downmarket restaurant into which they have moseyed is in fact "an Entertainment area". (The mode of entertainment remains unspecified, but given the presence of a number of forthcoming ladies in geisha costume, it's probably not karaoke.)
That said, this is decidedly not one of those therapeutic parables in which son and father embark on a journey, fail to unearth whatever elusive grail they were seeking, but instead find, y'know, each other. The laid-back central relationship is one of the many joys of the book. There is no parental agonising or filial umbrage. It is a story about that rarest and most exotic of subjects: relatives enjoying being together.
An account of the bombing of Tokyo's working-class suburbs during the second World War is powerful. One survivor remarks to Carey's son: "You were in New York, Charley, when the terrorists struck the World Trade Center. Three thousand people died. [ So] now imagine what one hundred and twenty thousand was like".
And Carey writes fascinatingly about ancient samurai traditions, how these continue to find expression in manga imagery. He includes a medieval diagram, assiduously drawn, ghastlier than anything dreamed up by Tarantino, of a semi-nude male body overlaid with a catalogue of sword cuts. It calls to mind the literary giant and noted spacer, Yukio Mishima, who was fond of having himself photographed as Saint Sebastian, arrows and all.
Carey completists will love this diverting slip of a book, but others who give it a chance will be just as pleased. Certainly, it is persuasive on the question it sets out to investigate, about whether the creatures that zoom through the cartoons of modern Japan are mutations of a much older set of mythical warriors. It is a modest little volume, elegantly proportioned, but in its own way it packs a kerpow.
Joseph O'Connor's novel, Star of the Sea, is published by Vintage paperbacks (€8.99)
Wrong About Japan: A Father's Journey With His Son. By Peter Carey Faber and Faber, 158pp. £12.99