Book Review: Tokyo Tempos

Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski

A touching essay collection of an adopted home

Award-winning mystery author Michael Pronko explores the mysteries of Tokyo and his life there as an English professor in Tokyo Tempos, a lively assortment of essays that continues the multivolume memoir begun with Beauty and Chaos. 

In this collection, Pronko reflects on his much beloved adopted city where he has lived, taught, and written for more than twenty years. A professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University, Pronko is the author of the acclaimed Detective Hiroshi mystery series, whose adventures are all set in Tokyo. For this fourth installment of his Tokyo Moments series, Pronko seeks to “bring Tokyo out of the background to see it for what it is. I want to ground myself in the city’s sense-seducing power.” And sense-seducing it is.

The essays are divided into four parts that detail Pronko’s charming observations of daily life in Tokyo, its mercurial seasons and rituals, the moments he calls “small intensities,” and his experiences instructing Japanese students as an American. Early on, Pronko suggests there is an “urgency” in his chronicling of those everyday experiences, where he hopes to “rediscover the meanings I found and still find before they get lost forever.”

From there, Pronko offers a medley of vignettes that are as eclectic as they are eloquent. In “Train Time,” he turns an ordinary train trip into an exercise in people studying, where he is convinced each traveler is an uncharted story (“the train is a bookstore filled with stories being lived.”) Then Pronko shifts into a more sustained soliloquy on the challenges foreigners experience navigating Tokyo culture and society, where survival depends on learning the Japanese rules and practices in “Tokyo Open and Closed.” 

Pronko’s scope encompasses both the mundane and the majestic. In “Photograph Everything,” he develops his idea that taking photos in Japan serves a higher, less narcissistic purpose than one might imagine. “Touching is rarer in Japan than in Western and most Asian cultures. When touch is socially restrained, photos bring people into contact.” He calls this obsession for photographing everything “a kind of national smiling therapy … that is no small deal in a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world.”

After he announces he can see Mount Fuji from his backyard, he dispels some of that glamor with how the iconic volcano looks today, with “even more factories…puffing out smoke” encroaching upon the volcano’s broad plain.

His other essays paint a vibrant portrait of Tokyo in springtime with the arrival of its heralded cherry blossom season in March and April, where “everyone in Japan stops to look at the same thing.” If he cannot replicate the smell of its wind-blown blossom petals, Pronko comes close with his almost romantic rendering of this seasonal and societal ritual, calling cherry blossom season “the annual wedding of humans and beauty.” 

Amusing entries on the “thermal” divide Tokyo endures every summer, where the “brain-stunning” heat of the outdoors is miserably matched by polar vortex air conditioning indoors, leads to Pronko’s conclusion that the “Japanese always claim to love harmony, but temperature is one issue on which no one ever agrees.”

Pronko’s concluding section is a mélange of thoughtful pieces describing his more meaningful moments as a teacher, from giving a wedding speech at a student’s wedding to mourning the death of another alongside her classmates. Through his students, Pronko says “I get to see their lives, and through the story of their lives, I see Japan.”

Tokyo Tempos is a charming, unaffected, and yet profoundly philosophical collection of essays on the colorful chaos that is Tokyo. 

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