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So, to mentally prepare myself for my upcoming trip to Japan, I've been reading some travel books, or more accurately, some books about travel. The first one I just finished reading tonight was Peter Carey's Wrong About Japan.
It's a pretty fun and light-hearted read which makes it a breeze to go through (I started last night before bed and read the remaining pages after work and over dinner). Before I turn this into another unnecessarily long winded review as I am wont to do, here's the main things I wanted to share.
First off, this passage. (I'm sure  sapphire_1010 will understand my paaaaaaain)
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“Yes,” said Charley. :And it would have been easy to take him to dinner with the otaku, to that place, you know, with that guy.” He was referring to the evening we’d spent in a Shinjuku restaurant patronized by manga artists, where the producer of the hugely popular anime and manga series One Piece taught him tricks requiring not a word of English, and where Yuka the otaku leaned behind my back and whispered to Charley, “Shush, big secret, there is a new Mobile Suit Gundam series, very soon.” And the mama-san had once been a famous radio announcer, and the master of the house was from as samurai family and now, suffering from emphysema, was sucking oxygen through plastic tubes, sitting grandly, cross-legged, while taking out orders. Gathered all around us were manga writers, artists, anime producers, publishers like Irie-san from Kodansha. Here someone had produced the latest Shonen Jump, a best-selling manga, warm off the presses, in which a huge spread depicted our host himself, a samurai with plastic tubes and a bevy of cute cartoon nurses tending him. We were, at that giddy moment, at the red-hot center of the manga world, or so it felt to both of us.“We definitely should have brought along Takahashi,” he said.
***
After I read that passage, my heart skipped a beat, and I reeled my mind reeled and screamed '...NO YOU SHOULD HAVE BROUGHT *ME* ALONG INSTEAD *SOBS*' or something to that effect. To be able to share dinner with Eiichiro Oda while making wise-cracks are stuff dreams are made of. Now I have the sudden impulse to hunt down that resturant in SHinjuku just for the off chance that I might be able to see him there. No, that would be creepy No it wouldn't YES IT WOULD
Also, I like Peter Carey's writing style and turn of phrase enough to want to hunt down his other books (apparently he's a Man Booker Prize Winning Author?) I shall end this entry with one of his lines in the book that made me snicker, if only because of the reference to an old Chinese story/myth.
***
On Mr. Kitakubo, creator of Blood: The Last Vampire: He looked like an underprivileged kid who had grown up drawing by the light of the open refrigerator door.
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