Michael Pronko - Tokyos Mystery Deepens

Raked Gravel Press 2014

Tokyos Mystery Deepens

By Michael Pronko

First Smashwords Edition, 2014

Copyright 2014 Michael Pronko

First English Edition, Raked Gravel Press

First Japanese Edition, Media Factory publishers, 2009

All rights reserved worldwide. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author.

eBook formatting by FormattingExperts.com

Cover Design 2014 Marco Mancini, www.magnetjazz.net

ISBN 978-1-942410-05-8

Curiouser and curiouser, cried Alice.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

And then, if your ideas get larger and you want to expandwhy, a dig and a scrape, and there you are! If you feel your house is a bit too big, you stop up a hole or two, and there you are again! No builders, no tradesmen, no remarks passed on you by fellows looking over your wall, and, above all, no weather.

Badger to Mole in The Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame

To make anything interesting, you simply have to look at it long enough.

Gustave Flaubert

Be careful how you interpret the world: It is like that.

Erich Heller

This book, of course, is dedicated to my wife.

Also by Michael Pronko:

Beauty and Chaos (2014)

Motions and Moments (2015)

The Last Train (2017)

More info at:

www.michaelpronko.com

@pronkomichael

www.facebook.com/pronkoauthor

About jazz in Tokyo:

jazzinjapan.com

I have lived, taught and written in Tokyo for fifteen years. I work as a professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University teaching American literature, film, music, and art. Fielding questions from my students about Jackson Pollock or Kurt Vonnegut and then wandering through Shinjukus neon chaos always pops ideas for writing into my head. Tokyo swirling around me, though, is always provocation enough to respond by essay to its urban mystery.

Over the years here, I have written for many publications: Newsweek Japan for a decade, The Japan Times for a dozen years, the once-great Tokyo Q, the weekly ST Shukan, Winds Magazine, Artscape Japan (Tokyo art, museum and architecture reviews, www.dnp.co.jp/artscape/eng/) and I run my own website Jazz in Japan (jazzinjapan.com). I also helped found Japans first bilingual jazz magazine, Jazznin and continue to publish academic articles and run a conference on teaching literature (www.liberlit.com).

The essays in Tokyos Mystery Deepens were, mostly, published first in Newsweek Japan in Japanese and were collected together in a single volume in 2009. Until now, these essays have never been published in English. Another collection of my essays on Tokyo, Beauty and Chaos, first released in Japanese in 2006, is available in both Japanese and English. A third collection, The Other Side of EnglishAn Anti-Grammar Manifesto first released in 2009 in Japanese, focuses on Tokyoites and the English language.

Their popularity here in Japan has led to my being invited for regular appearances on radio and TV programs for NHK (Japans PBS) and Nihon TVs The Most Useful School in the World, as well as several other places such as New York Channel One and the Tokyo based MXTV. Its very cool to video-fy the essays, but TV is its own world, far from words, and sometimes far from Tokyos gritty reality.

I was born in Kansas City, also a very different world from Tokyo. After traveling several years, in and out of graduate school, I lived in Beijing, China for three years. Now, I live in western Tokyo with my wife, Lisa Yinghong Li, to whom this book is dedicated. She also teaches and writes, and reacts to Tokyo with her own sense of awe.

If you enjoyed these essays, please consider writing a quick review to recommend it to other readers. I would appreciate it and I thank you in advance!

After clumsily stepping on the toes of a man getting off a crowded Chuo Line train at Yotsuya recently, I pulled up my foot instantly and said, Sumimasen! followed by a quick bow. The man look startled, perhaps because I was a foreigner, or perhaps because I shouted because my iPod was in my ears. In any case, he nodded in forgiveness. Though I didnt time myself, I felt surely that it was one of my fastest public apologies ever! I felt a bit odd, as I didnt decide to apologize. I just did it. Man, Im becoming Japanese, I said to myself.

As I hurried away from the site of my latest impoliteness, I realized I had been bettering my apology speed little by little during the years living here. And though my Japanese may not be as fluent as I want, since I still stumble along much of the time, I do feel confident that at the very least, my apology speed is at a very high level. Perhaps the best sign of adapting to Tokyo life is apology speed. Ill never be a native speaker, but I am already a native apologizer.

On that day, and others, too, I had a sense of pride in doing something so correctly Japanese. Most foreigners living here probably feel the same whenever they do something in the correctly prescribed form. A few small tricks of the city, then, like standing to the side when train doors open or not using up too much space or politely standing in line, are evidence of the degree of being Tokyo-fied. The older women at the grocery store are always impressed when I shove my bag out of the way to give them room to pack their groceries. I guess they are calculating how long I have lived in Tokyo, and they are probably right!

The most common questions on the adapting to Japan exam are usually about chopsticks, natto and seiza. Unlike apologizing quickly in public, though, all of these skills can be acquired through practice and conscious learning. Other things are learned through embarrassment. When I first came to Japan, I used to always forget to take off the bathroom slippers, walking foolishly back to the living room before the startled glances of people clued me in. Now, I switch from slipper to slipper with ease. And just for the record: chopsticks, no problem; natto, yuck; seiza, 5 minutes to numb legs.

I think apology speed shows the greatest adaptation to the public flow of Tokyo life. In other countries, of course, people also apologize, but in different ways and not so often. Every time I return to the States, my constant apologizing to strangers for small things makes me look like a fool. It took me years to realize that I could still apologize without feeling terribly sorry or truly embarrassed. In Tokyo, apologizing is more of an expected response than a deep feeling. Apologizing is a kind of protection against a minor situation developing into a more difficult one. Keeping small things small is essential when one has thousands and thousands of interactions with people all day, every day.

Most of those daily interactions are ignored and deleted like spam emails, but they need to be natural and immediate just the same. To keep a crowded city like Tokyo fluid and functioning at all requires millions and millions of small apologies and subtle bowing on any given day. One little sumimasen may not seem like much, but if all the Tokyo apologies were all to somehow mysteriously be silenced, the whole city would grind to a halt. Saying it is like throwing a little bit of oil on the huge social machinery to keep it running smoothly.

Apologizing means taking on a certain superficial,