{"id":1406,"date":"2024-12-20T14:10:03","date_gmt":"2024-12-20T14:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=1406"},"modified":"2024-12-20T14:10:03","modified_gmt":"2024-12-20T14:10:03","slug":"book-review-tokyo-tempos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/?p=1406","title":{"rendered":"Book Review: Tokyo Tempos"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Tokyo Tempos<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

by Michael Pronko<\/p>\n

Genre:<\/strong> Memoir \/ Essays<\/p>\n

ISBN: <\/strong>9781942410348<\/p>\n

Print Length:<\/strong> 238 pages<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Reviewed by Peggy Kurkowski<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong><\/strong>A touching essay collection of an adopted home<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Award-winning mystery author Michael Pronko explores the mysteries of Tokyo and his life there as an English professor in Tokyo Tempos<\/em>, a lively assortment of essays that continues the multivolume memoir begun with Beauty and Chaos.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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 \u201cbring Tokyo out of the background to see it for what it is. I want to ground myself in the city\u2019s sense-seducing power.\u201d <\/em><\/strong>And sense-seducing it is.<\/p>\n

The essays are divided into four parts that detail Pronko\u2019s charming observations of daily life in Tokyo, its mercurial seasons and rituals, the moments he calls \u201csmall intensities,\u201d<\/em><\/strong> and his experiences instructing Japanese students as an American. Early on, Pronko suggests there is an \u201curgency\u201d in his chronicling of those everyday experiences, where he hopes to \u201crediscover the meanings I found and still find before they get lost forever.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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From there, Pronko offers a medley of vignettes that are as eclectic as they are eloquent. In \u201cTrain Time,\u201d he turns an ordinary train trip into an exercise in people studying, where he is convinced each traveler is an uncharted story (\u201cthe train is a bookstore filled with stories being lived.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>) 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 \u201cTokyo Open and Closed.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Pronko\u2019s scope encompasses both the mundane and the majestic. In \u201cPhotograph Everything,\u201d he develops his idea that taking photos in Japan serves a higher, less narcissistic purpose than one might imagine. \u201cTouching is rarer in Japan than in Western and most Asian cultures. When touch is socially restrained, photos bring people into contact.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> He calls this obsession for photographing everything \u201ca kind of national smiling therapy \u2026 that is no small deal in a country with one of the highest suicide rates in the world.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

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 \u201ceven more factories\u2026puffing out smoke\u201d<\/em><\/strong> encroaching upon the volcano\u2019s broad plain.<\/p>\n

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 \u201ceveryone in Japan stops to look at the same thing.\u201d<\/em><\/strong> 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 \u201cthe annual wedding of humans and beauty.\u201d<\/em><\/strong>\u00a0<\/p>\n

Amusing entries on the \u201cthermal\u201d divide Tokyo endures every summer, where the \u201cbrain-stunning\u201d heat of the outdoors is miserably matched by polar vortex air conditioning indoors, leads to Pronko\u2019s conclusion that the \u201cJapanese always claim to love harmony, but temperature is one issue on which no one ever agrees.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Pronko\u2019s concluding section is a m\u00e9lange of thoughtful pieces describing his more meaningful moments as a teacher, from giving a wedding speech at a student\u2019s wedding to mourning the death of another alongside her classmates. Through his students, Pronko says \u201cI get to see their lives, and through the story of their lives, I see Japan.\u201d<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Tokyo Tempos <\/em>is a charming, unaffected, and yet profoundly philosophical collection of essays on the colorful chaos that is Tokyo.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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Thank you for reading Peggy Kurkowski\u2019s book review of Tokyo Tempos <\/em>by Michael Pronko! If you liked what you read, please spend some more time with us at the links below.<\/p>\n

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The post Book Review: Tokyo Tempos<\/a> appeared first on Independent Book Review<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tokyo Tempos by Michael Pronko Genre: Memoir \/ Essays ISBN: 9781942410348 Print Length: 238 pages Amazon Bookshop 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":1407,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1406","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-bookreviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1406"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1406\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1407"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1406"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1406"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bookloves.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1406"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}