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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 animé 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 City, could ever have imagined. As a Japanese friend warns Carey, when it comes to understanding Japan, "half-knowledge is sometimes worse than complete ignorance."

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 animé, 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 by this dazzling stuff—he hopes they'll "enter the mansion of Japanese culture through its garish, brightly lit back door"—but his real intention is to connect with Charley, who is on the brink of disappearing into the teenage years. So when Carey takes his son to Tokyo, where he arranges for them to interview Charley's favorite animé directors and manga artists, he's really becoming a gaijin twice over: in Japan, with its cultural crossed-wires and mind-boggling layers of meaning, and in adolescence itself.

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. We were gaijin, capable of only hurting the swords or ourselves." An interview with Yoshiyuki Tomino, creator of Mobile Suit Gundam and Charley's personal hero, devolves into a virtual stalemate, each side just missing the other.

The 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. (Carey has said he created Takashi as a device to give his story conflict. It's an odd decision but it works—though, thankfully for Carey, few genres of "nonfiction" have lower benchmarks for veracity than the travel narrative.)

Carey's concerns about his son are the heart of Wrong About Japan. One of the writer's most persistent misunderstandings comes over the term otaku, which typically describes fans so devoted that they all but lose touch with the rest of the world. Carey sees a metaphor for the otaku in the characters of Mobile Suit Gundam—kids who fight battles from inside giant robots, alienated from everything outside them. As Charley interacts more fluently with the ticket machines on the Tokyo subway than with the people around him, it's not hard to understand what Carey fears. But he's wrong again—a writer for Gundam explains that the kids inside the suits aren't isolating themselves from the world. Rather, she says, the robots represent "a safe place in which [they] can interact with the world," which is exactly what animé and manga have enabled Charley to do in his own world.

Carey never gets Japan quite right, but his writer's eyes always appreciate what they see. Near the end of their trip, father and son luck into a meeting with filmmaker Hayao Miyazaki. The language barrier, the cultural barrier, every barrier falls away as the delighted animé master shows flip-books of his early work, the characters dancing with life on the corner of the page. "Thank God we had no language," muses Carey. "Thank God there were no questions to ask, just the privilege of sharing the joy of a great artist telling a story to an audience."

• Bryan Walsh
• In Wrong About Japan, novelist Peter Carey explores pop Tokyo with his manga-mad 12-year-old