Carey License

Although Peter Carey’s new book, Wrong About Japan: A Father’s Journey With his Son, is a memoir, it contains a fictional character: A Japanese teenager named Takashi, who serves as Carey and son’s guide to Japan. Carey tells the Scotsman about this choice.

“To get to the argument and the conflict, I had to,” says Carey. “I wasn’t going to have conflict with anybody in real life. So I have this imaginary character do a whole load of things which didn’t happen.”

Carey says that without the invention, his trip with his son to Japan would have had no conflict to report about. If reality wasn’t interesting enough, then why not just fictionalize the whole thing?