by JULIET WATERS

"Be careful," warns Kosei Ono, highly respected cartoonist and critic of Japanese manga and anime, in a letter to author Peter Carey. "Half knowledge is sometimes worse than complete ignorance." If only more travel essayists would take this advice.

After reading Peter Carey's travel diary Wrong About Japan: A Father's Journey With His Son, the "sometimes" of Ono's statement becomes even more important. Knowing what you don't know can be a blessing, but it can also be a disability.

The common definition of writer's block is the inability get anything down on paper. A less talked about variation is that suffered by the writer who is having such crisis of confidence that whatever he writes is virtually drivel. You'd think a writer with two Booker prizes on his shelf would be immune to such a loss of nerve. Apparently not.

A large part of the problem is his subject material. Carey's picked three subjects that are especially hard to write about. First, manga and anime - Japanese graphic novels and animated film, respectively. I love graphic novels, but I always cringe at the prospect of reviewing them. It's a genre that relies so heavily on a minimal use of language that it's guaranteed to reduce most critics into wordy geeks. Maybe Kosei Ono is up to the task, but Carey certainly isn't. In writing about anime, Carey works way too hard to give it high-culture credibility. Given the critical success of masterpieces like Spirited Away, it hardly needs a defender. He tries to put its apocalyptic tone into some kind of historical context by interviewing World War II survivors. Brutal and horrifying oral histories from adults who were children when the bombs were dropped, however, only serve to make anime feel more lightweight than it would be if Carey weren't straining so hard to give it weight.

Then there's the next difficult subject, the fragile relationship between parents and adolescents. Here's a tip to anyone worried about being a parent to a teenager: the last thing you should probably do is write about it. Take some recent essays by Anne Lamott, which seem to be variations on one theme. Her teenage son Sam is angry at her. They fight. She backs off until Sam does something that convinces her he still needs her. He asks for a back rub, or crawls into her lap. Problem solved, I guess, until the essay is published. I used to like Lamott, but she's become like that hippie mother in About a Boy, so clueless about a teenager's need for emotional privacy it almost verges on abuse. Carey isn't as hopeless, but he's so tentative in writing about Charley, that the inevitable result is some pretty lame father-and-son moments. Father forces son to sit through four hours of Kabuki theatre. Son is angry and bored. Dad realizes he's made a mistake. Writer should realize reader will be angry and bored too.

And finally there's the subject of Japan - cryptic, fascinating, often unintentionally hilarious Japan. Maybe sensitive to the criticism heaped on Lost in Translation for making a little too much fun of Japanese quirks, it's like Carey has worked really hard to make sure that we don't find anything funny about Japan. The effect, of course, is dreary, as is Carey's need to point out every false assumption he makes about the country and his need to make it clear how much he hates the detail work on non-fiction, and how incompetent he feels at it. Does he think the reader either hasn't noticed, or has some way of giving him a pep talk?

In so many ways this book is doomed to failure. The best that can be said is that it seems to be an honest failure. I hate to say this, but a dishonest failure might have been more readable.

Wrong About Japan by Peter Carey,
Random House, hc, 168pp, $25