SYNOPSIS

MOTIONS AND MOMENTS

MORE ESSAYS ON TOKYO

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Motions and Moments is the third book on the fluid feel and vibrant confusions of Tokyo life. These 42 new essays burrow into the unique patterns intense moments of life that suffuse the city and ponder what they mean to its millions of inhabitants.

Based on Pronko’s 18 years living, teaching and writing in Tokyo, these essays on how Tokyoites work, dress, commute, eat and sleep are steeped in insights into the city’s odd structures, intricate pleasures and engaging undertow.

Included are essays on living to size and loving the crowd, on Tokyo’s dizzying uncertainties and daily satisfactions, and on the 2011 earthquake. As in his first two books, this collection captures the ceaseless flow and passing flashes of life in biggest city in the world with gentle humor and rich detail.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One: Surfaces
Why Ask Me?
The Language Dance
Urban Speed Poetry
Perfect Outfits
Don’t Drop It!
Cell Screen Tokyo
Public Tightness
Tokyo Asleep

Part Two: Miniatures
Perfect Forms
Fitting Things In
Fitting Me In
Small Item Heaven
Give-Away City
My Toe in Tokyo
What’s in a Name?
Thousand Armed Kannons
Plastic City

Part Three: Constructs
Construction and Resistance
The South Side Theory
Staying
Parting the Crowd
Double Construction
Ugliest City in the World?
Cleanliness, Tokyo-ness
Tokyo Symphony
Tokyo 24/7
The Summer Slowing

Part Four: Quaking
Are You OK? (March 18, 2011)
Shaken Up (June 20, 2011)
Earthquake Normal (October 2011)
Is This It? (April 2012)
That Was a Bad One (June 2015)

Part Five: Serenities
Year-End Busy
Learning to Love the Crowd
Tokyo Comfort City
A Meal in the Hand
Tokyo’s Traditional Pauses
Nature People
Jazz in Tokyo
Parting is Such Sweet Sorrow
Hanami, and Just After
Arigato-s and Gozaimasu-ses

Glossary

EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK

From “City of Eyes”

…The other day, for the first time, a young woman sitting on the Chuo Line train won the contest of “who will look away first.” In the past, I could always stare longer than anyone in Tokyo, but this Tokyo woman outstared me. I felt surprised, and maybe a little humiliated, that she could hold the eye contact longer than me--a Westerner! When I first came to Tokyo eighteen years ago, I felt bewildered because no one met my eyes. At the time I wondered: was something wrong with me? I felt alienated, anonymous, unseen. Shopping, teaching or walking around, it was hard to get a clear look into the heart of the city since people's eyes quickly shuttered. Of course, I knew that in Asian countries, eye contact carries vastly different meanings than in America where I’m from. In Asia, Japan especially, downcast eyes express humility and respect. But when eyelids clamped down, I felt the human side of the city was veiled and hidden from me. That frustration whetted my curiosity to peer inside Tokyo life, always hoping to join that elusive, secreted Tokyo life to mine. …

From “Nature People”

…Stepping around the side of the house into my back yard, both gardeners got very quiet. I didn’t know whether to admit I had in fact worked on the garden or to pretend I’d done nothing. Either one would have sounded stupid, so I just let them look around for a minute. When I jokingly confessed I had searched on the Internet to find out how to cut the two hydrangeas, which always seemed to be strangling on their own branches, they frowned deeply. “Pitiful,” they said, touching a branch of my misplaced, mis-cut, mis-tied pine tree. Seeing the neglect through their eyes, I knew I had stumbled onto another of my mistakes as a foreigner and onto another kind of Tokyoite. Aside from all the office employees, construction workers and service industry people in Tokyo, there is another more rare and special kind of Tokyoite—nature people. I had never met one before. All through Tokyo are people who work with nature. Their hard work and sense of beauty create a vast network that makes Tokyo a much more livable place. …

From “Staying Grounded”

… Cellphone navigation apps need a vertical position function in Tokyo. Without the vertical height information, some places would be impossible to find. If I’m looking for a new bar or restaurant, knowing which floor it’s on is essential. You can’t just look for the address; you have to also look up, or possibly down, at the signs for basement floors. And yet, Tokyoites seem to float comfortably at whatever level. Escalators, elevators, and other anti-gravity devices are considered a given part of getting anywhere. Recently, Tokyo has started moving up another floor. Most big stations now deliver passengers not onto actual streets, but onto recently constructed second level walkways that spread over the top of the bus and taxi stands, and, more importantly, shoot along a new row of second-floor shops and restaurants. To get to the ground at most stations, people have to first traverse raised sidewalks, overpasses, pedestrian bridges, and entire floors of department stores. Of course, at the same time, Tokyo is moving down another floor, too. …

From “Shaken Up”

… Buying plants and soil for my garden at the beginning of June [after the earthquake], the clerk who helped me at the home center stopped after I paid, pulled down his mask, reached across the counter and shook my hand, thanking me for staying in Japan and not fleeing after the quake. So many foreigners left after the quake, newspaper columns and online blogs branded them, “fly-jin,” a rhyme with “gai-jin,” the deprecating word for foreigner. Surprised by the clerk’s comment, I could only mutter, “I live here.” “I can see that,” he answered, smiling and wrapping my plants carefully in a large bag and taping up the sacks of soil so they would fit on my bicycle. There weren’t many customers, so he helped me out to my bicycle and steadied it while I tied them all in place for the ride home. As I biked away with my soil, vegetables, seeds and fertilizers, I almost went back to tell him I was not planting all these as a selfish luxury, but as a way to ease my sadness after seeing so much destroyed in Tohoku, and as a way to start to get back the hopeful energy that I always felt was the engine of Tokyo life, but which now feels almost lost. …

From “Hanami, and Just After”

… As the mothers lassoed their kids and packed the bikes to ride away, and I turned back towards home, the sun dipped under the horizon. As it did, the park darkened a bit but then bounced back with rays of light catching some fluke of atmosphere and cloud formation that turned the whole sky pink. All of us stopped and looked, the kids’ heads following their mothers’ photos and fingers, the entire park bathed in pink, glowing pink, the earth seemingly holding the moment for us. It was too pink to ignore. It covered everything in sight. They let out a collective waaahhh, as amazed as I was, stopped in my walk, and they fumbled for cellphones to take a photo. After a minute or two, the color spectrum slipped back to the orange-yellow-red of an average sunset, and it felt like the hanami season was over, finally, sadly, expectedly, until next year. The blanketing pink offered a reminder that beauty shows up annually on schedule, but it also arrives in swift gusts of rich and vivid surprise. …

AWARDS

Winner Non-Fiction
Best Indie Book Awards

Gold Award Reader’s Favorite Awards

Gold Award for Travel Non-Fiction
Global Ebook Awards

2016 Semi-Finalist “THE KINDLE BOOK REVIEW”

Kindle Book Awards

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

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

Finalist National Indie Excellence Awards

Silver Medal and Indie Groundbreaking Book IBPA Review

Foreword’s Book of The Year Awards
INDIEFAB FINALIST

Gold Award Nonfiction Author’s Association Award

REVIEWS

Interview with Feathered Quill

Link to site’s interview page Author Interviews Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Diane Lunsford is talking with Michael Pronko, author of Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo FQ: I thoroughly enjoyed Motions and Moments. The work flowed and I found myself often feeling as though I was engaged in endless conversation with you. Given this is… Continue Reading

Interview with Bookpleasures April 2016

Bookpleasures.com welcomes as our guest, Michael Pronko author of Beauty and Chaos, Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens and his most recent tome, Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo. Continue Reading

The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Michael Pronko

The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Michael Pronko Rebecca enjoyed Michael Pronko’s whimsical, poetic essays on Tokyo life and she had quite a few questions for the author when he popped into Bookbag Towers. http://www.thebookbag.co.uk/reviews/index.php?title=The_Interview:_Bookbag_Talks_To_Michael_Pronko Continue Reading

The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Michael Pronko about ‘Motions and Moments’

The Interview: Bookbag Talks To Michael Pronko about ‘Motions and Moments’ Last year Rebecca enjoyed Michael Pronko’s first book of essays on Tokyo life and she was delighted to be able to review his third book, Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo. She had quite a few questions for Michael when he popped into… Continue Reading

Nonfiction Authors Association Interview

Nonfiction Authors Association Interview http://nonfictionauthorsassociation.com/member-interview-michael-pronko-author-of-beauty-and-chaos-slices-and-morsels-of-tokyo-life/ Continue Reading

Interview on Doodles, Doodles Everywhere (book blog)

Interview on Doodles, Doodles Everywhere (book blog) February 13, 2016 http://gopaintbrush.blogspot.jp/2016/02/Motions-and-Moments-More-Essays-on-Tokyo-Michael-Pronko.html Continue Reading

Bookgoodies Interview

Bookgoodies Interview http://bookgoodies.com/interview-with-author-michael-pronko/ Continue Reading

Goodreads Interview

Goodreads Interview https://www.goodreads.com/author/2793539.Michael_Pronko/questions 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