Word: carey
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...Peter Carey?author of the novel Oscar and Lucinda, two-time winner of the Booker Prize, all-around intelligent bloke?has lots of thoughtful ideas about modern Japanese culture, almost all of which, he comes to discover, are wrong. He's wrong about the symbolism of his son's favorite anim? series, Mobile Suit Gundam. He's wrong about the artistic motivation behind Japanese sword-making. And he's wrong about the otaku, the ultra-obsessive Japanese fans of everything from manga to pop idols, who turn out to have more dimensions than Carey, an Australian living in New York...
...That frustrating fog of half-knowledge and misunderstanding?punctured by the rare moment of glorious comprehension?is the space Carey has set out to explore in Wrong About Japan. It's not a journey he expected to take. His 12-year-old son Charley, the kind of introverted preteen who would never deign to express interest in anything, gets hooked on anim?, manga and all things cool that are Japanese. Charley's excitement is enough to inspire his father, and soon the middle-aged literary novelist is parsing the finer points of Akira and Astro Boy. Carey is intrigued enough...
...Carey arrives in Tokyo loaded with clever theories, his earnest questions already translated into Japanese. But he meets with frustration again and again. A visit with Yoshindo Yoshihara, one of the last swordsmiths working in Tokyo, is an exercise in polite disappointment, as the master deflects and deflates all questions, making it clear that the meaning of his craft, like the ability to handle his swords, can't cross cultural borders. "We would not know the etiquette, how to sit, how to hold the scabbard or the hilt, how to slide the blade out by the back surface only...
...problem, as any 12-year-old could tell, is that Carey is trying too hard. With his novelist's critical intelligence, he seeks to ferret out the meaning of modern Japan, while Charley is content to skip the subtitles and absorb it image by image. The contrast is accentuated by the presence of Takashi, a spiky-haired 15-year-old who serves as a kind of alternative guide to Japanese pop culture. The father looks at Takashi and his son in the electric district of Akihabara and sees a "mutated species"?one that he worries has become all but incomprehensible...
...sound of “Mary Did You Know,” the drums broke into a strong, smooth beat that had the whole church bobbing and clapping. “Now Behold the Lamb” produced the kind of soulful sound normally associated with artists as Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston. But it was one of the song’s soloists, Kuumba president Shola Olorunnipa ’05 who stole the show with unrestrained excitement in her voice, leading the audience (as well as fellow Kuumba singers) to explode with applause...