A light read, charting Carey's stay in Japan with his twelve year old son (I have a feeling that it's at least partially fictionalised) and organised around the author's misunderstanding-riddled series of interviews with various Japanese figures associated with anime and manga (including an encounter with Hayao Miyazaki, which proves the exception in that it works as a child-like show-and-tell interaction rather than breaking down into mutual incomprehension triggered by Carey's questions). The recurring theme is the futility of Carey's attempts to 'understand' the Japanese psyche - and, in particular, to detect traces of bushido, the initial encounters with the west, the scars of Hiroshima/Nagasaki (and, indeed, the whole of WWII) and so on, in contemporary Japanese art, and to partially explain that art in terms of these historical facticities. Over and over, he asks Japanese artists and craftspeople leading questions along these lines, and over and over is met by polite rebuttals and denials that these are meaningful ways of engaging with their work.
By the end, Carey seems to have reconciled himself to the existence of this unbridgeable gulf - or, at least, to the inadequacy of his own existing frameworks as means of understanding such a different culture - but he doesn't come across in a particularly favourable light (still, no one said that authors had to be pleasant people), and the book itself is, while interesting enough, a bit on the pointless side.
