I’ve been watching early reviews of Peter Carey’s anime-and-manga travelogue, Wrong About Japan, trying to decide if it will make the buy list or the borrow list. Marcel Theroux writes a puzzling commentary in Sunday’s New York Times (free registration required) that makes me throw up my hands and wait until the book reaches my local library.
The bottom line seems to be that as a writer of non-fiction, Carey is a great novelist. And there’s nothing wrong with that, provided nobody had any scholarly or journalistic expectations for the book. Still, it seems like something I’d rather read for free. (Part of this may be my growing disappointment with the last hardcover I bought, Magical Thinking by Augusten Burroughs. After really enjoying his first two autobiographical pieces, Running With Scissors and Dry, this seems like David Sedaris Lite.)
There is one passage in Theroux’s review that stopped me flat:
“By the end of the book, you feel you’ve witnessed a series of rather moving encounters between the author and one of the more baffling cultures of our time: one that combines technological sophistication and inscrutable inwardness; a culture largely impenetrable to outsiders, yet which remains unignorable — not least because of its economic power.”
Initially, I thought Theroux was talking specifically about manga/anime culture. (If it’s so baffling, why is it so popular in so many places?) Then I realized he was talking about Japanese culture as a whole, which strikes me as much, much worse. It’s like Theroux is saying, “They’re weird, but they’re rich, so what can you do?”
Now, I used “inscrutable” in this week’s Flipped, but I did so with tongue in cheek (and, yowza, do I hope it came across that way). I honestly never expected to find this kind of “mysterious east” stuff presented without irony in the New York Times.
(For those who don’t get the post title reference, have you still not listened to the soundtrack to Avenue Q? What are you waiting for?)