SYNOPSIS

TOKYO'S MYSTERY DEEPENS

Essays on Tokyo

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What happens when large bugs get trapped on crowded Tokyo trains? How does allergy season affect Tokyo’s millions? Ever wonder why Japanese love to take photos together or how everyone feels during rainy season? How is Tokyo made so compact and made as much from imagination as from concrete and steel?

Tokyo life is equal parts trial and joy. This collection offers up essential skills for living in the vastest, most crowded city in the world—sweating politely, suffering noise and glancing in mirrors–and muses over the minutest of daily details—window flowers, eye contact and small gestures of thanks.

If you’re traveling to Tokyo, these essays point toward the undercurrents of life and if you’ve ever considered visiting Tokyo, these essays will give you more reasons to go. If you live in Tokyo, you know all this, but you can always know it again. Tokyo’s Mystery Deepenstaps into the enigmatic sides of Tokyo with humor, delicacy and a large dose of healthy confusion.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part One: Essentials of Tokyo-ism
Apology Speed
Looking Away
Walking Shoji
Tokyo Lights
Tokyo Brain Navigator
Testimony in Red
Wiping Away the City
Window Poetry
All Together Now
Detailed, Orderly and Unread
City of Small Gestures
A Little to the Side

Part Two: More and More Mysterious
Motion Sickness
What Do You Think?
Truckloads of Noise
Imagine a City
Uniformly Confident
Rush Hour Traitors
Mirror, Mirror on the Wall
Twins’ Mystery
Where There’s Smoke
Tokyo in a Bottle
Tested to the Limits
Strange Exits
Forgotten Spaces
Double Tokyo

Part Three: Seasons in the Labyrinth
So Close Yet So Far
The Torture of Spring Breezes
Seasons of Sickness
The Grey, Green Season
Beer-ing the Heat
Sweating It
Fall Changes
Autumn Hanami
Illuminated City
Ambient Places

Part Four: Deep Inside the City
Bugs on the Train
Sports Center, Story Center
Compact Life
Down in the Basement and Right at Home
Closest and Warmest
People Unstrung
A Different Pace
Tokyo Lunch World
Flower-opolis
The Soil of Tokyo
City of Souvenirs
Tokyo, Tokyo, Tokyo
After Words
Afterword
Thanks
Glossary

EXCERPTS FROM THE BOOK

From the Introduction

… Tokyo is a place full of hidden meanings and provocative experiences. I feel compelled to think about Tokyo more and more with each passing year. Like Alice in Wonderland, I find Tokyo to be “curiouser and curiouser.” I start from a need to satisfy my own inner curiosity, but try to expand my understanding of Tokyo more broadly and deeply, too. Tokyo’s meanings appear only in scattered observations, odd experiences, and disparate fragments of life. Tokyo is a city that resists generalization, in a very willful and quirky way. Tokyo is a capricious city, so that you can interpret it in many different ways. Like a traditional Japanese garden, wherever you look it seems to be a different place altogether. Moments of alienation are followed by moments of exhilaration; aggravations turn to amusements; confusions tumble into insights. You just have to step to a different point of view and look again. …

From “Tokyo in a Bottle”

…That something so small, yet so powerful, is so omnipresent says a lot about the energy flow of Tokyo. The little [energy drink] bottles combine three of the great loves of Tokyoites: love of small, love of instant, love of genki. It’s the perfect combination, marketing wise, and Tokyo is the perfect target, as it is a city where being tired is only rarely confessed. There’s always a nijikai, another street to walk along, another store to look into, all the time. That these little bottles are waiting everywhere means that at some point the energy runs out, but people just want to keep going. Tokyo is a city that burns energy, but never burns out. Tokyoites value power, stamina, energy and clear-headedness. Still, people get tired individually and need a little pick-me-up, but that energy is also siphoned into the collective experience of Tokyo, as if the gods of Tokyo ask for only one kind of contribution—energy. And then, they give a little return gift okaeshi in the form of power drinks. You can take one if you want or just know it’s there. The city could not function without them. They offer to restore what has been drained by the hassles of commuting, overworking, too much partying, and the many, many other ways that Tokyo consumes our energy. …

From “A Little to the Side”

…Millions of people pass by millions of people every day in Tokyo, and almost no one bumps into each other. Why? Tokyo side vision! This human radar is extremely sensitive and works from all angles. When I pass by people walking slowly, they seem to know exactly when to step aside to let me pass, even without turning their heads! Their special side vision tells them to step to the left on the escalator or scrunch over on the train, even with their earphones in. I marveled at this for years, wondering at times if Tokyoites had eyes in the back of their heads. What at first seemed to me a sixth sense, I know now is a skill developed by a lifetime of daily practice. More than just a mobile necessity, though, Tokyo side vision is a way of looking around when standing or sitting down, too. Squeezing onto the fixed stool at my favorite ramen place in Kichijoji, I know that everyone along the counter is using their side vision to check me out. They probably received a visual hint that I was a foreigner as I came in, so in between bites of noodles and spoonfuls of broth, they glance to the side to see how I’m doing with my ramen. It’s a kind of peripheral visual community. ...

From “Imagine a City”

…Tokyo has nothing like the endless brickwork of London or elegantly curving boulevards of Paris, which to me are the definitions of urban reality. European cities surround you in artistically conceived and unified surroundings, alongside their gritty authenticity. In Tokyo, you bump up against one wacky idea of how to use space after the next. My always impressed “How beautiful!” in Europe gradually turns to a bemused “How strange!” back in Tokyo. Tokyo is a city built from bursts of imagination; European cities from the smooth application of aesthetic principles. In Europe, cities embody the past plainly and directly, but in Tokyo, even the oldest buildings end up sandwiched between attempts at novelty. Tokyo’s urban planning seems more like urban gaming--virtual, shifting and always new. …

From “After Words”

… Social or psychological studies might deliver grand generalizations, and literature might present one single character’s experiences, but essays are free to roam between those two poles, sometimes all-encompassing, sometimes singular. Tokyo is an enervating place, but also an inspiring one. Writing about Tokyo is a process of re-energizing. It does for me what I guess an evening bath does for many Tokyoites, restores and re-humanizes. Tokyoites are amazingly good at switching modes, from a small focus to a huge one, from close attention to total indifference, from the anonymity of a massive city to intimate connections and embracing friendships. Essays fit Tokyo well for just that reason. They can switch modes quickly and easily. …

AWARDS

Gold Award for
Essays/Creative Non-Fiction

(eLit Awards 2015)

Silver Award for
Travel Essay

(eLit Awards 2015)

REVIEWS

Five Star Review

Link to site Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens by Michael Pronko JUNE 25, 2016 ~ NOVELLOVER97 Book Review Title: Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens Author: Michael Pronko Genre: Non-fictional/Slice of Life/Essay Rating: ***** Review: I wanted to say before I begin this review is going to be slightly longer than some of the other ones I do because this book is a… Continue Reading

Review from Midwest Book Review

“If Michael Pronko’s prior Beauty and Chaos captured the exquisite essence of the urban heartbeat that is Tokyo, then this follow-up essay collection, Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens, is its soul, offering up pieces of Tokyo’s psyche through the observations of a visitor who became immersed in its culture.” Continue Reading

4 out of 4 Stars Online Book Club

Author Michael Pronko is a professor of American Literature at a well-known university in Tokyo. He has lived and worked in Japan for over fifteen years, and his articles have appeared in several popular Japanese publications. He has also appeared on television and radio programs to discuss his work. Continue Reading

4 out 5 from Luxury Reading

“An insider’s view of what life is really like in this pulsing, densely populated Asian metropolis…this little book of short, easy to read essays delivers to its readers an education about the cultural variances between Americans and Tokyoites.” Continue Reading

Excellent Rating from Bookreview.com

“Now, the man writes so well you will want to keep turning the pages, but I would suggest that you pull back and read one or two essays at a time. Tokyo—all the different Tokyos that we meet—takes a bit of getting used to.” Continue Reading

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