The numbers, Mason. What do they mean?

This one’s a little tricky. I set up an argument, then halfway through I flip it and argue the opposite. I’m talking about what things mean in fiction, and how fair it is to expect your audience to know what they mean when that meaning isn’t found anywhere in the story itself. It’s about in- and out-of-text references, basically.

Got it? Right.

At the end of the eleventh theatrical Star Wars movie and ninth in the main series of trilogies, “The Rise of Skywalker,” the heroine Rey “Skywalker” Palpatine return’s to Luke’s childhood home, buries his and Leia’s lightsabers in the ground, then pulls out her own newly-made one and briefly ignites it. Revealing, dun dun DUN, that the blade is … yellow! Wow.

So the capstone, the culmination and the climax of nine movies, forty years, thousands of special effects shots, a centillion toys and one young boy’s rather unhealthy fixation with Carrie Fisher was: A lemon-flavored lightsaber.

So what?

Well, that’s a good question. What does it mean? It’s a new color, after the blue, green and red ones we’ve seen in the movies (and Samuel L. Jackson’s purple one), so, symbolic of new beginnings maybe? As a kid who grew up with the toys, the only thing it calls to mind is that one of the Luke action figures had a yellow lightsaber. The movie is packed to the hyperdrives with callbacks, so maybe it’s just another blast of pointless nostalgia?

What I’m saying is, it’s not calling back to anything we’ve been shown earlier in the movie, or even in any of the earlier movies. There’s no reference in the “text” (the story or action of the movie, or book, or play, or game, or whatever) to lightsabers of any color having any meaning.

Some people get really mad when you say that, though (and they have, otherwise I wouldn’t have bothered to write this post). Of course a Star Wars nerd immersed in, sigh, lore, will tell you all about the 2003 video game “Knights of the Old Republic” and how a game mechanic designed to allow for character and playstyle customization means X Y not to mention Z, but come on, to your average audience member, the scene meant precisely jack shit. The meaning, to the extent there is one (and I think the gamers are giving JJ Abrams far too much credit), is found out-of-text.

“The Rise of Skywalker” does this a lot, not just about the color filter of its lightsaber effects. What the heck is Exegol, who lives there, where did they get a huge fleet and the people to crew it? Ah, read the Visual Dictionary. Finn's putative Force-sensitivity was explained in an interview with Hollywood Reporter. And so on.

Star Wars isn’t the only franchise doing it either. Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling apparently spends most of her post-Potter years tweeting new facts that never appeared in the books, such as Dumbledore’s sexual proclivities.

This gets into the more interesting question of semiotics—what do things mean—and more specifically, in- and out-of-text references in constructing meaning.

Let’s set the ground rules first. If you want an action or thing in a movie to have some meaning beyond the thing itself—such as Cobb’s spinning top in “Inception” being symbolic of his obsession with the past, or the idea that only those ‘worthy’ can pick up Thor’s hammer in “Age of Ultron”—then that meaning has to be established in the story itself. It has to be in the text. It can’t be buried in some 20-year-old video game. You can’t just stick it in the Visual Dictionary or mention it casually in a tweet. Stories don’t work that way. The meaning has to be in the story. It can’t be out-of-text.

This isn’t some special law of movie-making or book-writing, this is just, like, “if you want people to know what you’re talking about you have to explain what you’re talking about.” You know? “The message of the story has to be in the story.” It’s common sense.

OR IS IT?

Told you I was going to flip this halfway through.

There are plainly things you can reference and allude to without spelling it out for the audience, or even hinting at within your book or movie, yet you can still fairly expect them to understand. If someone finds a sword in a stone, you’ll automatically know that pulling out that sword is a sign of worthiness. The writer doesn’t have to remind you of the whole King Arthur mythos, they can expect you to know it. If some dude gets shot or stabbed and flails his arms to the side in, you know, the shape of a cross, we don’t have to be told this is an allusion to Jesus. You don’t need an establishing conversation where characters talk about what a nice bloke Jesus was and how sad it was that he got crucified. We just get it.

Let’s go back to Thor’s hammer. Later on in the movie series, in “End Game,” Captain America picks up and uses the hammer. The movie doesn’t explain the whole worthiness thing all over again. It assumes you know, even though it’s a reference to an earlier movie, not within “End Game” itself.

In other words, I think the concept of what is “in-text” and “out-of-text” is elastic. For some things, we can expand it, based on a shared culture and understanding. In the introduction up there, I tossed around the names Luke and Leia and just expected you to follow along, because anybody who knows about Star Wars will also know who they are. In the Marvel movies, there’s a whole freight train of characters, relationships, abilities and other universe-building you’re just expected to be on board with from the get-go.

To a certain extent, then, I think it’s fair to expect audiences especially of these larger, longer-running and more popular franchises, to get not only the surface meaning but also the connotation of it without signposting back to earlier works in the series.

The question then becomes, how far does the concept stretch? If older Star Wars movies are fair game, then what about the video games? The comic books? The, sigh, Visual Dictionary? If it’s reasonable to expect audiences to be familiar with other Marvel movies, how about the comics? Where do you draw the line?

I think the only honest answer is ‘depends,’ and I think it depends both on the audience, how engaged they are with the property, and on the thing being referenced. The broader the audience, the less in-depth knowledge they’re going to have. More cultish fanbases are probably more accepting of obscure references.

Similarly, the more popular the thing being referenced, the more you can get away with. You can reference the Bible without too much preamble.

Though this has to be of secondary importance, because the purpose of all communication is to have the thing you are trying to communicate be understood by someone else. If you’re just pontificating for your own gratification, jeez, write a blog or something. Oh.

Star Wars, at least in its original incarnation, had the broadest audience imaginable. Everyone saw it. You can certainly still put winks and callbacks from games or comics into the stories for the uber-fans, just don’t make them part of the climactic finale. More targeted offerings like the Disney+ shows can get away with more because they’ll have a narrower audience. Hence, literally every character who has ever appeared will now be appearing in season 2 of “The Mandalorian.”

Marvel movies, similarly, have huge, huge audiences, the Avengers ones in particular the hugest, so you can safely refer to other movies, but probably not the comics. Even Captain America needed a first movie to establish who he was. Again, a costume, a line of dialog, sure, throw the die-hards a bone, but you can’t have a key plot point depend on reading Uncanny X-Men #129 (Jan. 1963, “Save us from the Knights of Hellfire!”)

Back to Rey’s lightsaber then. The KotR game came out in 2003, and Wikipedia tells me it sold 3 million copies, making it pretty popular. Ah. But. “Rise of Skywalker” made $1 billion internationally, so assuming a generous $20 per head, that works out to 50 million people (“The Force Awakens” made twice as much, FWIW). The problem is then that you had a climactic scene which slightly less than 10% of the audience had even a chance of understanding, even assuming every single person who bought the game also saw the movie.

So I’m not saying movies and books or whatever can’t do it, but come on, let’s be reasonable. We know the fannest of fans have read every tie-in novel, comic book and Wookiepedia entry, played every game, watched every episode of every show. That cannot and should not be the baseline for any product hoping to have a mass appeal.

Yes to the idea that the ‘text’ of popular movies should include a basic understanding of the way these universes work or who the people are, but no to the idea that this extends to cover every single scrap of minutiae.

The one about canon

I’m in a spouting nonsense mood, and the target of today’s spout is the concept of canon. Particularly as the term applies to the concept of the fictional ‘facts’ of a fictional universe, as portrayed in various works of fiction.

The facts of fiction. Right. It’s fundamentally an oxymoron.

Canon in its modern meaning didn’t really matter until properties like Star Wars and Star Trek expanded beyond their home bases in movies and TV respectively, into books, comics, video games and tabletop games. The idea was to ensure consistency in plot and world details, even as you had dozens, scores, if not hundreds of different writers working on different stories in different media more or less at the same time.

The hardcore fans of pretty much anything love it. Love it, love it, absolutely love it. Lap that stuff up like it’s liquid ketamine. Can’t get enough of it. Canon makes the whole phenomenon of gatekeeping fictional properties possible. There are few things that warm their hearts more than telling each other they’re wrong about the canon. Few things they cherish more than pointing out errors and inconsistencies in canon, or endlessly fan theorizing about it, constructing great cathedrals of meaning out of throwaway lines published in, like, a children’s picture book.

And they shouldn’t. By god, they shouldn’t. If you really love Star Wars, or Star Trek, or, lawd, I don’t know, My Little Pony, you should absolutely be against the idea of canon. Reboots, remakes, retellings, alternate and parallel universes, mashups, all of the things that destroy canon mean you get more of the property you love. You get more and more varied stories. You get to experience it more, fresh and new again. You should love it when content creators throw canon to the wind.

Yet we don’t, and I’m not sure why. I don’t think there’s anything inevitable about canon. In fact, it’s a little weird that people cared.

There’s no obvious reason why they would—after all, the one modern entertainment medium where multiple writers had long worked on a shared universe was comic books, where characters live, die, appear to die but don’t, are reborn, reincarnated, rescued from alternate dimensions or future timelines as a matter of course. Spider-Man has been through more incarnations than a Hindu with a death wish, there have been more Batmans in history than there have been presidents of the United States of America and the X-Men’s Jean Grey has been killed and resurrected at least twice a decade since the 70’s.

Looking back at history, there too we find the concept of fictional canon is notable mainly for its total nonexistence. Disney’s efforts to the contrary, there is no one single, canonical version of any of the fairy tales, nor of Achilles, nor King Arthur. There’s evidently nothing inherent in fiction that requires or demands that there be a canon.

Plenty of modern properties also ignore the whole concept altogether—there’s no Mad Max canon, although some have tried to write one, Doctor Who’s time-traveling shenanigans make mincemeat of the very concept at anything but the most basic level, Dungeons and Dragons novels largely get around the concept by having enough alternate worlds to give Schrodinger’s cat an anxiety attack.

While there are sound storytelling, narrative objectives in ensuring consistency among your various story lines, it’s not hard to see there are less pure motives at work, too.

There are obvious commercial reasons for the property holders’ love of promoting the idea canon. Together with copyright, it is one more lever that ensures they maintain control of, and can profit from, the shared universe. Property holders alone get to determine what counts and what doesn’t, giving their own products a seal of legitimacy and banishing all others to the despised realm of fan fiction.

Gatekeeping is another obvious motive. Collecting, memorizing and categorizing facts makes a lot of people comfortable, gives them a sense of order and control that is otherwise often missing from our lives. Knowledge of canon can be used to browbeat other fans and make yourself feel smarter, more important in whatever fan community you’re a part of. So it’s rooted in insecurity and fear, too.

The good news is, I think the idea of canon is going to wither away slowly but surely. The most popular franchises at the moment, Marvel and Star Wars and Star Trek, are all reaching the limits of what they can do within a single, supposedly internally consistent continuity. Star Trek has already rebooted both its movies and streaming properties (calling it a TV show sounds anachronistic now, doesn’t it?) New Star Wars properties sound like they’ll be set in different time periods, precisely to get away from problems with canon. The original actors in Marvel movies are reaching the ends of their contracts.

You see long-term, canon is simply unsustainable. I’m a fan of the BattleTech games that have been around since the 80s, and my God, the canon is a useless mess. It just accretes, gathers more and more mass, weighing down everything about the property until you can’t write anything new about anything in this universe. It calcifies everything, ossifies it, fossilizes it. Nothing new can be done, nothing can grow. It kills the property.

As we move more and more into more oral styles of storytelling, I think this will accelerate the trend. We’ll want the same stories retold over and over, which will kill the whole purpose of canon.

It’s time for canon to end.

Fireside Chat with a Favorite Uncle

TITLE: How Would You Move Mount Fuji?
AUTHOR: William Poundstone
PUBLISHER: Little, Brown and Company

RATING
5/5 "Verrry Slowly"; 4/5 "Magic"; 3/5 "Get Godzilla to Stomp On It"; 2/5 "With Chewing Gum, String, and the Moon's Gavitational Pull"; 1/5 "A-Bombs"
SCORE; 4/5

After a really bad job interview, ever felt the interviewer had it in for you right from the get-go? It may not be just in your head. A Harvard study found that random people watching a 15-second clip of job candidates entering, shaking hands with their interviewer and then sitting down scored the candidates almost identically to the interviewers themselves.

That's just one of the fascinating anecdotes that percolates through William Poundstone's tasty blend of corporate history, puzzle book and job-seeker advice, "How Would You Mount Fuji?".

The book feels more like a collection of loosely-linked magazine articles than a single narrative. While it's ostensibly about the "logic puzzles" used in Microsoft's job interviews, Mr Poundstone is more interested in telling a good story than helping you land a job coding for Mr Gates and co. Instead of a how-to guide, it's more like a friendly chat with a beloved but scatterbrained uncle.

Mr Poundstone starts with a critique of traditional interview techniques, where he mentions the Harvard study. He explains how the failings of these methods led to the increasing use of logic puzzles and branteasers in interviews, especially at Microsoft and at investment banks. Next we get a look at the organization and corporate philosophy of Microsoft itself. Mr Poundstone follows with a sample of the puzzles themselves. The second half of the book is more prescriptive, with advice for both job-seekers and interviewers on how to ask and answer logic-puzzle questions.

Regardless of the slightly butterfly progression from topic to topic, Mr Poundstone is always a highly entertaining guide, and despite the math-heavy subject, he writes clearly and simply enough even for an amateur booker reviewer to understand. Some of his proposed solutions to the puzzles seem a little too literal (his answer to the question of the title is to calculate the volume of Mt. Fuji using the formula for a cone, then calculate the number of dump trucks required to haul all the stone away). For most of the others though, you'll be kicking yourself for not getting his answer.

Since the book was originally published in 2003, the reputation of Miscrosoft, and especially its spiritual siblings on Wall Street--such as Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs--have taken a bit of a beating, so whether their model of interviewing is worthy imitating or not is a bit of an open question. The book's utility and appeal to job-seekers therefore seems a little doubtful. However, it is an enormously funny read for anyone just interested in puzzles, the history of interview questions, or the culture of Silicon Valley.

How would I move Mount Fuji? Stand on my head. Voila! I've turned it upside-down.

Starry Eyed Traveller Brought to Earth

TITLE: The Blue-Eyed Salaryman: From World Traveller to Lifer at Mistubishi
AUTHOR: Niall Murtagh
PUBLISHER: Profile Books

RATING
5/5 "Cobalt"; 4/5 "Sapphire"; 3/5 "Blue"; 2/5 "Azure"; 1/5 "Cerulean"
SCORE 3/5


Over the past 20 years, Japan's corporate giants have gone from walking tall to staggering a bit, to finally lying supinely on the floor. What is surprising is not that the country tripped--we all have our bad days--but that it has never really found its feet again. This insightful book helps you see why.

Before the collapse of its economy in 1989, Japan's manufacturing might had amassed Croesus-like wealth, fueling a spending spree that famously included the Exxon Building and Rockerfeller Center. However, the years since, the main thing Japanese companies seem to be acquiring is foreign CEOs (Nissan, Sony). While Japan still boasts champions in a number of fields (Canon, Toshiba, Toyota), there is no Japanese version of Microsoft or Apple, of Cisco or Oracle, Nokia or RIM, Allianz or AXA, Pfizer or Bayer.

Mr Murtagh was another international acquisition of Japan Inc., and although his book is not written as an analysis of the country's economic malaise, the symptoms are all there in his account. Through his plainly told, straightforward account of his graduate studies in Tokyo, recruitment by the Mitsubishi Group--one of Japan's largest and oldest conglomerates--his growing disenchantment and final resignation from the company, you can start to get a feeling for how myopic and parochial Japanese corporate culture can be. His final, damning analysis is that "The fundamental problem is that the managers making the decisions have no experience of anything other than the company they work for ... they don't even realize their decision-making leaves much to be desired".

After working for 10 years in both the public and private sector in Japan, including a term at another one of Japan's largest companies, I can attest to the accuracy and universality of much of Mr Murtagh's observations, from corporate daddy-cultures that have managers admonishing staff not to walk with their hands in their pockets, to meeting minutes that focus solely on the lofty pronouncements of senior executives.

If all this sounds rather heavy-going, the book itself is a surprisingly light read. Mr Murtagh's style is understated and simple, if a little heavy on sarcasm. It's not exactly sparkingly funny; the tone lurks just beyond the penumbra of wit, exuding a sort of black humor born of corporate cupidity and indifference. The book is at its best when it has management in its sights. A bit like Dilbert, minus the cubicles and punchlines.

The book is not all overalls and overtime, which is a pity, for the bits that aren't about work are easily the book's weakest. In between meetings and business trips, Mr Murtagh details his neighbor troubles and love life--none of which is especially insightful. I'd suggest readers looking for a better treatment of an outsider's life in Japan read Bruce Feiler's "Learning to Bow" (somewhat dated) or even Dave Barry's "Dave Barry Does Japan" (also dated, but hilarious). For the insider's look on daily life, try Alex Kerr's polemical "Dogs and Demons", Karl Taro Greenfeld's "Speed Tribes" or Michael Zielenziger's "Shutting Out the Sun".

A Little Gem of a Tirade

TITLE: The Angry Island: Hunting the English
AUTHOR: AA Gill
PUBLISHER: Simon & Schuster

RATING
5/5 "William Shakespeare"; 4/5 "The Duke of Wellington"; 3/5 "Margaret Thatcher"; 2/5 "Guy Fawkes"; 1/5 "Robbie Williams"
SCORE 4/5

Mr Gill's polemical little treatise is simply awful. It is one of the most venomous, hate-filled, bile-soaked bundles of papers created ever since Mr A. Hitler put down the paintbrush and took up the genocide-advocacy business.

It is also one of the most delightful, lyrical books I've ever been fortunate enough to read.

I exaggerate, of course, and this is exactly what Mr Gill does as he sets about deliberately trying to demolish every shibboleth, to pull the tail of every sacred cow, to dispel every assumption there ever was about the English.

His central theme is that far from being restrained, witty, animal-loving gentlemen, the single defining characteristic of the English is their anger. He does so in 16 vitriolic chapters smashing preconceptions on everything from humor and drinking, to gardening and sports. It's perhaps with deliberate irony that a book that takes the English to task for their madness should do so in such froth-flecked terms.

Indeed, it would be easy to be distracted by the book's many annoyances. Take, for example, Mr Gill's pedantic insistence on identifying himself as a Scot, despite having lived his life since age 1 in England. Not only does this strike me as ungrateful, but the whole "Scotland is a country" riff comes off as childish, like two siblings drawing an invisible dividing line down a shared bedroom.

Yet getting angry with Mr Gill would not only prove him so smugly right, but it would also deprive you of the joy of his prose. Whatever I think of the man or his views, he knows how to write, how to make words sing. In Mr Gill's prose, stairs are "clumsy" with flowers, class snobbery is as "smart as a wet patch" on the front of your pants, airports are "the maternity units of queues".

However over-the-top his views, there is much here that is intelligently observed. Take, for example, the English war against the Zulus, in which England doled out an unprecedented number of Victoria Crosses. The really brave ones, notes Mr Gill, were the Zulus, who took on the British armed with no more than a knife on a stick and a leather coffee table. His enumeration of all the ways "sorry" can mean something else, if not its complete opposite, is spot-on.

Finally, the book is undoubtedly funny. As he admits in the chapter on Humor, English jokes are often at their funniest when aimed, not shared, and his own book is Exhibit A. This attack on the English class system is as hilarious as it is unprintable. His description of the English delight in their own misfortune--a kind of self-reflexive schadenfreude--will tickle anyone who has spent time among the English.

Disjointed, bombastic, frequently wide of the mark, Yes. But also witty, intelligent and poetic. Ah, the man may talk like the devil, but he writes like an angel.

A Travel Companion, Not a Guide

TITLE: Japan's Cultural Code Words: 233 Key Terms That Explain the Attitudes and Behavior of the Japanese
AUTHOR: Boye Lafayette De Mente
PUBLISHER: Tuttle Publishing

RATING
5/5 "Sake"; 4/5 "Anime"; 3/5 "Karaoke"; 2/5 "Pokemon"; 1/5 "Bukkake"
SCORE 3/5

In “Japan’s Cultural Code Words”, American author Boye Lafayette De Mente seeks to provide businessmen dealing with Japan a primer on negotiations, by using key concepts in Japanese society and psychology as a window into their behavior. The book works as a traveling companion, one you dip into now and again, but likely fails in its mission to act as a guide.

The 200-plus expressions are arranged alphabetically, from ageashi (“tripping on your tongue”) to zanrei (“breaking the molds of the past”). Mr De Mente explains the origins of each term in light of Japan’s more-Orwell-than-Orwell feudal past or atomic defeat in World War II, then suggests ways foreigners can accommodate or adapt to each.

Mr De Mente’s book offers a kind of cut-away diagram into the Japanese soul, and there are insights here even for experienced Japan-watchers. However, he does at times appear removed from the grittier aspect of Japanese society—for example, he claims “Freetas” (from the English for freelancer, used in Japan to describe anyone working on freelance or short-term contract work rather than in a permanent position) are envied for their freedom, when in fact the growing number of people unable to find stable employment is considered a serious social ill.

Mr De Mente is generally balanced and fair in his description of Japanese behavior. He praises their virtues, but pulls no punches with what he sees are their fundamental faults, especially their enduring parochialism and the strange mix of smugness and envy that lace their dealings with the West. Those whose exposure to Japanese culture is limited to the occasional California roll at a Korean deli will doubtless find him overly critical, but experience teaches that his criticism is usually justified. (Full disclosure: I have lived and worked for the past 10 years in Japan).

The book is aimed squarely at the business community, and Mr De Mente attempts whenever possible to proffer potential negotiators with advice on how to handle their Japanese counterparts. This raises the book above the level or mere catalogue, even if the advice often boils down to “deal with it”.

Unfortunately, organizing the terms alphabetically rather undermines this effort. It’s a garage sale of sociology, a dusty attic with unorganized memorabilia, a primer that is 90 percent tertiary information. There are some shiny new ideas and sparkling insights, but finding them requires considerable hunting. The books offers no bulleted list of things to do, no consistent rules to follow, nothing in short that your would-be entrepreneur to wrap their brain around. Some of the information is highly abstract and esoteric, and likely wouldn’t be much use to negotiators even if it was put in an easier-to-digest format.

More to the point, the book begs the question why outsiders should go out of their way to accommodate the Japanese rather than vice versa. Particularly given Japan’s 20 years of stagnant growth and its rapidly-disappearing lead over competitors in fields such as household electronics and automobiles, it’s getting harder and harder to justify the extra effort it takes to do business with the Japanese. The demand to be treated on their own terms might have been justifiable when they lead the world; this position grows increasingly untenable the farther they fall behind their neighbors.

If a reader is patient and thorough, this reference guide will doubtless help them navigate the notoriously difficult business climate in Japan. It’s harder to say why anyone should care to try.

Japan: The View from America

TITLE: Shutting Out the Sun: How Japan Created Its Own Lost Generation
AUTHOR: Michael Zielenziger
PUBLISHER: Vintage

RATING
5/5 "Thin Red Line"; 4/5 "Black Rain"; 3/5 "You Only Live Twice"; 2/5 "Last Samurai"; 1/5 "Karate Kid 3"
SCORE 4/5

It's ironic that Asian and Western criticisms of one another's cultures tend to agree on the facts, but assign them to opposite sides of the pro/con balance sheet. For example, you often get the feeling that American's main beef with Japan is that, well, it isn't America. Your reaction to Mr Zielenziger's 2006 critique of Japan's society will therefore largely depend on your views of America's. Personally, I found the book packed with fascinating details, but in these post-subprime, Lehman Brothers-less times, reading his conclusions and prescriptions feels a bit like getting investment advice from Bernard Madoff.

There is no faulting Mr Zielenziger's ambition. Based on his experiences as a journalist based in Tokyo from 1996 to 2003, he aims to "unravel the unusual ... constraints that have stifled the people of this proud, primordial nation". The particular thread he teases out to help us understand this cultural kimono is the phenomenon of hikikomori, Japan's estimated 1 million adult social recluses, who as the book's title suggests sometimes go so far as to tape shut their windows, symbolically "shutting out the sun" and, by connotation, the rest of Japanese society. Mr Zielenziger uses this issue as a springboard into a discussion of Japan's wider malaise, grazing omnivorously across such topics as the declining birthrate, the popularity of designer brands, high suicide rates and poor political and corporate governance.

Mr Zielenziger's argument is that social pressures which ensure conformity have stunted innovation and expression, creating an anomic collection of depressives whose only comfort is found in owning the latest from Louis Vutton. Fun fact: One marketing company is quoted as estimating that a staggering 94 percent of Japanese women age 25-29 in Tokyo own one or more LV-monogrammed accessories.

The country's only choice, Mr Zielenziger affrims, is to "undertake fundamental reforms and social adjustments to ... empower the individual, ecourage more risk-taking, flatten hierarchies and induce its people to integrate more effectively with the outside world."

This is too simplistic. Would becoming more American really be the panacea for all that ails Japan? How, for example, are we to take the lament that Japanese invest only 11 percent of their savings in equities, "instead of entrusting the funds to a foreign manager at Merrill or Schwab"? Yes, that would've turned out well. Likewise, I'm not convinced that having "only 40 percent" of large Japanese companies adopt US-style governance is necessarily a bad thing.

To be fair, the depth and breadth of Mr Zielenziger's research clearly puts it a step above most lay accounts of Japanese culture (end notes! a bibliography!). At the same time, this is no scholarly text, and Mr Zielenziger is careful to allow the Japanese to speak for themselves through numerous interviews. This approach makes for a highly entertaining, at times fascinating, treatment of a topic that could easily have been as upbeat as a funeral dirge.

However, the seriousness of his research is sometimes undermined by his breathless prose and excessively credulity at some of his interviewee's statements. Japan's society carries "a dark and destructive seed" we learn, but alas hopes that Godzilla will emerge from it go unrewarded. Much of the chapters on hikikomori is filled with new-age psychobabble of the "I used my son to get back at my relatives" vein. He is also far too glowing in heaping praise on South Korea, which he holds as a paragon of all that Japan is not--despite the fact that the former remains a tightly-lidded, export-fired pressure cooker of a society, much like Japan. Mr Zielenziger's obsession with the role of Christianity in Western culture is unfair to our own humanist and rational traditions, and makes you doubt his reading of Japanese psychology.

Are suicides, fewer babies and sluggish growth the price to pay for stability, order, safety and trains that run on time? I don't think there is a definitive answer, but the question is surely worth more consideration that Mr Zielenziger gives it here. Despite his many insights then, what you get out of his book depends on what you bring in.