Book Review: Beauty and Chaos

Book: Beauty and Chaos: Slices and Morsels of Tokyo Life by Michael Pronko

Source: Borrowed from Publisher/NetGalley for an honest Review

Publication: Available now

Description:

Tokyo--City of Contradictions? The largest city in the world teems with chaotic energy and serene, human-scale beauty. Writing about Tokyo for over 15 years, essayist and professor Michael Pronko opens up Tokyo life and reveals what’s beneath the gleaming, puzzling exterior of the biggest city in the world.

Whether contemplating Tokyo’s odd-shaped bonsai houses, endless walls of bottles, pachinko parlors, chopstick ballet or the perilous habit of running for trains, the 45 essays in Beauty and Chaos explore Tokyo from inside to reveal the city’s deeper meanings and daily pleasures. In turns comic, philosophic, descriptive and exasperated, Pronko’s essays have been popular with Japanese readers for more than a decade.

Essay Topics Include:
Cherry Tree Maps
Bonsai Buildings
The Shout of English T-Shirts
Hanging Menus
Inside the Smallest Places
Standing Libraries

If you’re traveling to Tokyo, these essays enlarge the significance and illuminate the contradictions of this fast-paced megalopolis. Part travelogue, part comparative culture, and all creative essay, Beauty and Chaos taps the mysteries of Tokyo and lets the meanings flow.


Rating: 5 stars

Review:

Sometimes it's nice to do a little arm chair traveling and see the world through an author's words. Beauty and Chaos is a well-written book filled with essays where the author describes Tokyo from daily living to the architecture. Although, the author has lived in Tokyo for quite a while, there were times in some of his essays where a new experience had him feeling like a total newbie to living in the city.

Many of the essays give you a sense that life in Tokyo (as in most big cities) can be chaotic and frustrating although sometimes you can stumble upon something completely unexpected like seeing the blossoms blooming on the cherry trees. From the author's observations of the city and the people who reside in it, you see humor, drama and the familiar.

There were so many of the essay that I simply enjoyed reading. I laughed as I read some of them meanwhile others had me thinking as well as had me wanting to look at my own city and see if there are things I'm overlooking on a daily basis.

I've never traveled to Tokyo (but would like to one day) and I've seen the city through TV shows, movies and books but it was nice to read about the author's first hand account of living there.  You're never going to get the full grasp of something unless you actually experience it yourself but I found Beauty and Chaos gave me an interesting look at the city through wonderful writing.