Charley Carey is lucky to have an old man like his dad. After all, the typical father-son powwow involves standing over your pop while he fiddles with a broken appliance. Or a nice crisp fall day and a football whizzing at your head.

	"WRONG ABOUT JAPAN" By Peter Carey Knopf ($17.95)

For Charley, however, the bonding occurred in a comics bookstore in New York City, where he and his father, the novelist Peter Carey, used to go Saturday mornings to inspect the goods.

They were interested in manga, the splashily illustrated Japanese comic books that sell by the billions there. Their interest was turned into a journalism assignment for Peter Carey in Tokyo interviewing Japanese animators.

If this were any other duo, the Careys would have wound up with a nice photo album. But since this is Peter Carey the writer, we now have a book, a charmingly comic tale about a father and son's shared experience of cultural confusion in Japan.

Bill Murray and Scarlet Johannson fell in love in the film "Lost in Translation." By the time jet lag descends here, though, Carey and his son have already moved in different directions.

The father wants to see the "old Japan" of tea gardens, Zen masters and Noh theater. Charley wants to see the new Japan of video arcades, comic book stores and anime films.

Quickly a divide opens up that is part generational, part national. Their differences find a bridge in the form of Takashi, a Japanese boy Carey's son met over the Internet.

Decked out in the latest fashions, with an aura of otherworldly lightness, he agrees to be their guide.

Carey's description makes Takashi sound like something out of a Japanese anime film.

"In Tokyo's Harajuku district one can see those perfect Japanese Michael Jacksons, no hair out of place, and punk rockers whose punkness is detailed so fastidiously that they achieve a polished hyper-reality. Takashi had something of this quality. He had black hair that stood up not so much in spikes but in dramatic triangular sections. His eyes were large and round, glistening with an emotion that, while seemingly transparent, was totally alien to me."

Carey's prose often sounds a lot like this passage, with its confectionary swirl of cartoon images and journalistic remove.

Whether by accident or on purpose, Carey has found a unique literary anodyne to the world of Japanese anime. As a result, these memoirs are both homage to Charley and to the art form which so captivated him.

This influence infuses their trip -- or the telling of it -- with a plangent and sweet sense of adventure.

For example, the Careys stumble into a restaurant and see a fat man in the kitchen. Is he a gangster or merely the chef?

On a cab back to their hotel they pass a hotel; or might it have been, as Carey wonders, a "house of ill repute?"

Takashi is sometimes around to help them tell the difference, but other times he is not there and Carey finds himself, once again, wrong about Japan.

The man in the restaurant, who seemed too much of a cliche to be a gangster to Carey, apparently was one; the swordmaker Carey interviews practically laughs in the novelist's face when he asks if making a sword is a spiritual action.

Reading the book, you sense this is a significant moment for Carey -- a necessary boundary to establish.

Indeed, after Sofia Coppola's film, it became rather too easy for Tokyo to be seen as a signifier for emotional estrangement.

In this unlikely little memoir, which is lavishly illustrated, Peter Carey puts the culture back in the picture, while he choreographs an artful emotional tango between a father and son who are trying -- and mostly succeed -- not to be lost in translation with one another.