Wrong about Japan, Peter Carey

In Wrong about Japan, Peter Carey brings us along with his twelve-year-old son Charley in a travel to Japan through the lens of manga and anime. While interviewing the most reknown artists of the genre, from Mr. Tomino (Mobile Suit Gundam) to Mr. Miyazaki (Grave of the Fireflies, Totoro) and Mr. Kitakubo (Blood: the last vampire), he highlights some glimpses of the Japanese culture and history that appear in sometimes tiny details in the artworks, such as why an anime warrior uses clogs with only one heel or tooth, or the meaning of the single rope around Totoro's camphor tree.

To give a better understanding of the cultural inheritance of manga to both his son and the readers, Peter Carey conveys us to a kabuki show, visits a swordsmith or goes back to the Edo period quoting a number of authors to cultivate our desire to go deeper with a good reading list peppered within his book to do so.

Mixing a lot of dialogs and a vivid experience of the country while traveling there, he shows us how much the cultural differences are so deep that any Western interpretation of the meaning of manga and anime is always way off the chart, lost in translation so to speak, the true essence of these stories being mostly inattainable.

Of course, I am not American and my relationship with television is far from loving, but that was beside the point. Yuka explained that manga and anime were rooted in kamishibai, or “paper theatre,” an earlier tradition of visual storytelling. Kamishibai was particularly Japanese. It had no relation whatsoever to the West. The kamishibai man, Charley and I now learned, would travel around the city on his bicycle, on the back of which he carried pictures mounted on cards. When he arrived at a suitable park or street corner, he would bang wooden blocks together to attract an audience. Then, as the children gathered, he would set up his cards and, with these pictures and his own artful narration, beguile his audience with ghost stories, fairy stories, samurai stories, structuring them like soap operas in that every episode ended with a cliff-hanger. A good kamishibai man always left his audience hungry for his next visit.

Wrong about Japan (Vintage editions, 2006, 176 pages), is written by Peter Carey, an Australian novelist born in 1943 (Bacchus Marsh, Victoria).