Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens: Essays on Tokyo

Tokyo! Mysterious? Baffling? Unknowable?
In these essays, the biggest city in the world comes clearer and closer!

Writing about Tokyo for over 15 years, Michael Pronko unlocks the many, miniscule doors leading to Tokyo life. These 48 short essays reveal what’s hidden behind the gleaming exteriors and unconcerned faces in the busiest, most peopled city in the world.

Pronko’s concise essays ponder the minutest of cultural details---window flowerbeds, eye glances, face masks, and the many small gestures needed to navigate past thousands of people a day—to uncover the rich undercurrents of Tokyo life.

As in his first collection of essays, Beauty and Chaos, Pronko examines Tokyo as a city, as a culture and as intense experience. Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens explores the enigmatic sides of Tokyo with humor, delicacy and fascination.

Gold Award for Creative Non-Fiction (eLit Awards 2015)
Silver Award for Travel Essay (eLit Award 2015)

Whether contemplating Tokyo’s odd-shaped bonsai houses, chopstick ballet or the perilous habit of running for trains, the essays in Beauty and Chaos explore the world’s biggest city from the inside. Living in and writing about the city for over 15 years, Pronko shows why Tokyo is the most amazing, confusing place in the world.

Digging into overlooked slices and morsels of everyday life in, these short essays spin insight from observation. In turns comic, philosophic, descriptive and exasperated, the essays in this collection untangle contradictions and open inner connections. Tokyo emerges a fascinating place of chaotic commotion and human-scale beauty.

Gold Award First Place for Cultural Non-Fiction (Reader’s Favorite Awards 2015)

Gold Award for Creative Non-Fiction (E-Lit Awards 2015)

Gold Award for Travel Writing (Non-Fiction Authors Association)

Motions and Moments is the third book by Michael Pronko on the fluid feel and vibrant confusions of Tokyo life. These 42 new essays burrow into the unique intensities 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 the biggest city in the world with gentle humor and rich detail.

Gold Award Readers’ Favorite Non-Fiction Cultural (September 2016)
Gold Award Global E-Book Awards Travel Writing (August 2016)
Gold Award Non-Fiction Author’s Association (2016)
Gold Honoree Benjamin Franklin Digital Awards Independent Book Publishers Association (May 2016)
Winner Best Indie Book Award Non-Fiction (November 2016)
Silver Medal 2016 Independent Publisher Book Awards Best Adult Non-fiction Personal E-book (2016)
Indie Groundbreaking Book by Independent Publisher Book Review (April 2016)
Finalist National Indie Excellence Awards (2016)
Finalist Foreword’s Indiefab Book of the Year Awards (2016)
Finalist Travel: Guides & Essays 2016 International Book Awards (May 2016)
Finalist Travel Independent Author Network (2016)
Semi-Finalist Kindle Book Review Awards (2016)

Sukanya, a young Thai girl, escapes into Tokyo from human traffickers who will do anything to recover the computer she took. With help from Chiho, a Japanese girl living in a net café, she tries to get free from her pursuers and her past. Detective Hiroshi Shimizu tracks the killers through Tokyo’s teen hangouts and deserted docks, straight into the underbelly of the global economy and the highest reaches of the power elite.

When the top American diplomat in Tokyo, Bernard Mattson, is killed, he leaves more than a lifetime of successful Japan-American negotiations. He leaves a missing manuscript, boxes of research, a lost keynote speech and a tangled web of relations.

After his alluring daughter, Jamie, returns from America wanting answers, finding only threats, Detective Hiroshi Shimizu is dragged from the safe confines of his office into the street-level realities of Pacific Rim politics.

With help from ex-sumo wrestler Sakaguchi, Hiroshi searches for the killer from Tokyo’s back alley bars to government offices, through anti-nuke protests to the gates of an American naval base. When two more bodies turn up, Hiroshi must choose between desire and duty, violence or procedure, before the killer silences his next victim—and the past.

Detective Hiroshi Shimizu investigates white collar crime in Tokyo. When an American businessman turns up dead, his mentor Takamatsu calls him out to the site of a grisly murder. Together with ex-sumo wrestler, Sakaguchi, Hiroshi scours Tokyo’s sacred temples, corporate offices and industrial wastelands to find out why one woman would be driven to murder when she seems to have it all. Hiroshi’s determined to cut through Japan’s ambiguities—and dangers—to find the murdering ex-hostess before she extracts her final revenge—which just might be him.