SYNOPSIS

BEAUTY AND CHAOS

SLICES AND MORSELS OF TOKYO LIFE

Beauty540x360 Whether contemplating Tokyo’s odd-shaped bonsai houses, endless walls of bottles, pachinko parlors, chopstick ballet or the perilous habit of running for trains, the essays in Beauty and Chaos explore Tokyo from the inside to reveal its deeper meanings and show why Tokyo is the most amazing, confusing city in the world.

Starting with observations and ending with insights, these essays dig into the ever-present but overlooked slices and morsels of daily life in the world’s biggest city. In turns comic, philosophic, descriptive and exasperated, the essays in this collection won acclaim in Japan from Tokyo readers.

Beneath Tokyo’s perplexing exterior, there’s meaning to the frantic swirl. By untangling the contradictions of the city and opening inner connections, Tokyo emerges a fascinating place of chaotic commotion, but serene, human-scale beauty, too.

If you’re traveling to Tokyo, these essays open up the sense and significance of life in this fast-paced, high-rise megalopolis. If you’ve ever considered going to Tokyo, these essays will give you more reasons to go, and ways to consider the city when you’re there.
Originally published in Japanese, these essays are available in English for the first time. Part travelogue, part comparative culture, and all creative essay, Beauty and Chaos taps the mystery of Tokyo and lets the meanings flow.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One: Fastidious Refinement, A Meticulous Love of Life
No Space Left Unmapped
Automatic Tea Ceremony
Floods of Advertising—On Sale Now!
What’s Your Bag?
Life Delivered to the Door
Half Empty or Half Full? Walls of Bottles
Waiting to Blossom—Cherry Tree Maps
How I Ended Up Here

Part Two: A Beautiful Confusion
Frames of Emptiness
Clothing That Shouts—T-shirt Words
Standing Libraries
Reading the Signs
The Point of Point Cards
The Noisiest Time of Year
Ordered Around—Public Rules
The Delicate Ritual of Small Change
A Big Bowl of Japan

Part Three: Scenes from the Train
The Paperback-Cellphone hypothesis
The Pumpkin Train—Late Night Commuting
Hanging On the Meaning
The Ebb and Flow of Human Motion
All the World’s a Stage-Train Platforms
Slideshow Lives, Glimpses Inside
Both Directions at Once, Change in the City
Tokyo’s Million Marathons
No Time to Spare—Schedules

Part Four: Beauty and Chaos, Slices and Morsels of Tokyo Life
Souvenirs from the Land of Impulse—Don Quixote
Elegant Eating—the Art of Chopsticks
What Goes Around Comes Around—Pachinko
The Tradition of Banners
The Summer Whispers and Calls
Bathing in Kanji—Hanging Menus
Pink Power
Floating in a Sea of Words
Singing in the Rainy Season

Part Five: A Maze of the Mind
Up and Down and Down and Up—City of Stairs
A-maze-ing Tokyo
The Shiny and the Rough
Escalators to Heaven
The Love of Small Places
Around and Around—Going in Circles
Bonsai Buildings

Part Six: After Words
Seeing the City, Reading the City
The City Provokes Me—Why I Write These
Japan and Me
After Words and Thanks[…]

EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK

From “The City Provokes Me—Why I Write These”

… My only real qualifications for writing about Tokyo are passion and curiosity. I think of my writing as a response to the rich untapped veins of underlying meanings in the city's life. Tokyo is what I'd call a "juicy" city, lacking the correct anthropological or urban studies jargon. Flavorful, complex, satisfying, and chewy, like a slice of chashu meat in ramen, Tokyo drives me not towards well-defended conclusions, but towards open-ended musing and unlikely connections. My own education is in philosophy, education, literature and film. I draw on a little of each in my writing. Ideas, approaches, situations and images intermingle in these essays, without paying heed to the rigorous procedures and prescribed frameworks of journalistic, academic, public policy or nihonjinron writing. Like its sodden, reclaimed and earthquake-prone land, Tokyo offers no easy foundation on which to build a high-rise mansion of meta-narrative. That's OK with me. I'm not interested here in accurate historicism, disciplined research, or watertight theories. I'm interested in answering the myriad questions Tokyo asks me every day. …

From “Both Directions at Once, Change in the City”

…That Tokyo changes constantly is a truism; but what fascinates me is how and why it changes, and in what directions. To me, Tokyo often seems like a fickle teenager, moodily swapping its clothes every whipstitch. In parts of the city I only sometimes go, multi-storied buildings sprout up and entire stations are carved out seemingly overnight. At times it seems half of Tokyo is shrouded behind the metal walls of construction sites. The dizzying pace, though, is only part of the change; there’s process and purpose there as well. Passing by the same places twice a day on my commute, I see the gradual progression of projects with a kind of time-lapse photography. At Shinjuku station, where my train pauses, construction blazes forward on the busiest station in the world. Once out at my stop, I walk by a temple, where restoration of a sacred spot ambles along at an entirely different pace, and different direction. Watching these two construction sites, I realize that Tokyo changes both towards the future and back towards the past. The contrast between the station and the temple could hardly be sharper. Yet, Tokyo encompasses both transformations with equal ease. …

From “Frames of Emptiness”

… Few areas of Tokyo have architectural coherence like in the west, where entire sections of cities were built at the same time. Instead, one building stands up at one time, divided by a gap from another building time altogether. Tokyo's patchwork quilt is thus sewn together not with cement or mortar, but with open space. The gaps form a frame of emptiness around otherwise imposing buildings and lend a kind of fragility to the entire urban layout, as if the city is a row of dominos waiting to be tapped to have each knock over the next in a long flowing line of energy. The gaps though, too, soak up excess structural energy to give a reprieve from Tokyo's intensity. Most strikingly, the gaps create an atmosphere of loneliness, as if all the buildings stand apart from each other like strangers without communicating too well. As I pass by them, they feel like a blink of sadness, a glimpse at the inner mind of Tokyo's architectural face. These gaps form a kind of structural "ma," like the pauses so important in Japanese conversations. The gaps let the city catch its breath and offer, amid the overpowering density of Tokyo, the relief of a moment of emptiness. …

From “Elegant Eating—the Art of Chopsticks”

… Working the chopsticks is a delicate, nimble process, requiring coordination and concentration, but not looking as you do so is missing the whole point. The chopsticks enact the food, display it, and energize it. Everything wiggles in the air. This re-created motion is clearest especially when eating uncooked foods, which are so common in Japan, and complement chopsticks well. Pieces of fish, especially fish, become re-animated by the motion towards the mouth. The sashimi lives swimmingly again for a moment before being tucked away. But even crackly, deep-fried tempura shrimp are temporarily re-born. Small white slivers of pulled apart fish—steaming—seem to wiggle all the more before being popped inside. Dense packets of sticky rice sway for one last moment before performing rice’s purifying and satiating role. Long disobedient strings of natto require a circular flourish of the arm to recapture escaping threads. Vegetables quiver in warmth and color. This movement also presents different angles of the food to the eater’s eyes. It allows one to see the near side as well as the far side of the morsel, an entire three-dimensional area. …

From “After Words”

… Tokyo is an imaginary construct, of course, and does not really exist in any single place or in any exact way. It's a city whose hugeness refuses even metaphoric understanding. Tokyo slips through words like water through a net, or to use the Buddhist metaphor, writing about it is like catching fish with a hollow gourd. Just the same, I hope I've caught at least some sort of small fish, yet it's probably the feeling of thanks here that will slip away fastest back into the watery immensity of the city. …

AWARDS

Gold Award First Place
Cultural Non-Fiction
(Reader’s Favorite 2015)

Gold Award
Travel Writing
(Non-Fiction Authors Association)

Gold Award
Creative Non-Fiction
(E-Lit Awards 2015)

Silver Award
Travel Essay
(eLit Awards 2015)

REVIEWS

Best Indie Book Awards

Winner Non-Fiction Best Indie Book Awards Continue Reading

Gold Award Reader’s Favorite Awards

Gold Award Reader’s Favorite Awards . Continue Reading

Global Ebook Awards

Gold Award for Travel Non-Fiction Global Ebook Awards Continue Reading

2016 THE KINDLE BOOK REVIEW

2016 Semi-Finalist “THE KINDLE BOOK REVIEW” Kindle Book Awards Continue Reading

Finalist Award

Finalist “Travel: Guides & Essays” 2016 International Book Awards Continue Reading

gold honoree benjamin franklin awards

Gold Honoree Benjamin Franklin Digital Awards (Independent Book Publishers Association) Continue Reading

finalist national indie excellence awards

Finalist National Indie Excellence Awards Continue Reading

Indie Groundbreaking Book IBPA Review

Silver Medal and Indie Groundbreaking Book IBPA Review Continue Reading

Motions Foreword’s Book of The Year Awards INDIEFAB FINALIST

Foreword’s Book of The Year Awards INDIEFAB FINALIST Continue Reading

Motions and Moments Nonfiction Author’s Association Award

Gold Award Nonfiction Author’s Association Award Continue Reading

THE AUTHOR

Michael Pronko

I have lived, taught and written in Tokyo for fifteen years. I work as a professor at Meiji Gakuin University teaching American literature, culture, film, music, and art. Fielding questions from my students about Jackson Pollock or Kurt Vonnegut and then wandering through Shinjuku’s neon mayhem always puts ideas for writing into my head. Teaching keeps me searching for the heart of life in the world’s biggest city.

I have written for many publications in Japan: The Japan Times for a dozen years, the once-great Tokyo Q, a learner-oriented weekly ST Shukan, Winds magazine, Jazz Colo[u]rs (in Italian!), and Artscape Japan. I have run my own website Jazz in Japan (jazzinjapan.com) for almost a decade. I also helped found Japan’s first bilingual jazz magazine, Jazznin and continue to publish academic articles and run a conference on teaching literature.

The essays in Beauty and Chaos: Slices and Morsels of Tokyo Life were originally published in Newsweek Japan in Japanese and then collected together in a single volume in 2006. Two more collections followed, also in Japanese, The Other Side of English—An Anti-Grammar Manifesto and Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens, both in 2009. These other two collections will soon be out as e-books in both Japanese and in English.

Until now, these essays have never been published in English. Their popularity here in Japan has led to my being invited for regular appearances on programs for NHK (Japan’s PBS) and Nihon TV’s “The Most Useful School in the World.” It’s fascinating to video-fy the essays, but TV is a very different mindset from the written word. Essays seem to capture Tokyo best, or at least offer a calm space from which to ponder it all.

I was born in Kansas City, also a very different world from Tokyo. After traveling around the world and popping in and out of graduate school, I lived in Beijing, China for three years. Now, I live in Tokyo with my wife, Lisa Yinghong Li, who also teaches and writes.

Two mystery-thrillers set in Tokyo, The Last Train and Tokyo Hand will be coming out soon!

VIDEOS