Michael Pronko's Blog, page 4
August 10, 2020
Booklife Review
Booklife Review
Pronko’s third Tokyo-set Detective Hiroshi police procedural (after The Last Train and The Moving Blade) adds a number of exciting, modern twists to a familiar genre. Pronko alternates among the narratives of three characters: Sukanya, a young Thai woman brought to Tokyo against her will and witness to a grisly multiple murder on a porn film set; Kenta, a hustling ex-con trying to track down Sukanya, who has stolen his computer with video footage of the crime; and Hiroshi Shimizu, a forensic police accountant assigned to the murder case. Pronko ramps up the tension as Sukanya tries to flee Japan, Kenta attempts to find her, and Hiroshi’s team pieces together clues, culminating in an explosive conclusion.
Pronko smoothly informs new readers of all they need to know about Hiroshi. He’s a refreshing character who defies the tough-cop stereotype, a thinker whose expertise is in following the money. There are just enough moments spent on his private life with his girlfriend, Ayana, to understand the fraught complexity of their relationship. Hiroshi’s colleagues on the force are also memorably portrayed and have wonderful camaraderie. The main characters all get their own detailed backstories and sense of agency, with the women having particularly rich, varied motivations.
Attention to detail is essential to this novel’s success. Pronko overexplains some cultural details, which slows the narrative’s otherwise tight pace, but it’s worth it as he makes the setting pop. While he doesn’t flinch from the unsavory details of murder, child pornography, and human trafficking, Pronko is careful not to exploit them for thrills. Modern details, such as cryptocurrency as a method for criminals to make money vanish, add a 21st-century touch. This is a sophisticated, humane, and compelling take on the modern police procedural.
Takeaway: Fans of police procedurals will thrill to this mystery’s lively characters, vivid descriptions of Tokyo, and unlikely heroics.
Great for fans of Seicho Matsumoto’s Inspector Imanishi Investigates, Arimasa Osawa’s Shinjuku Shark, Miyuke Miyabi’s All She Was Worth.
July 9, 2020
Summer’s Divide
From Motions and Moments (2015)
In summer, Tokyo splits in two. Only when summer ends does Tokyo finally come back together into a whole again. This huge urban division isn’t economic, political, geographic or social—it’s thermal. About June, the city divides into two completely different spaces—shiver inducing cold or brain stunting hot.
Every city in the world takes defensive measures against heat, but Tokyo surely has more air-conditioned spaces than any city in the world. It is like Tokyo has two entirely different seasons–one inside and the other outside. American cities are designed around cars and Italian cities around churches, but Tokyo seems designed around air-conditioning. It’s a basic urban principle.
When I first moved to Tokyo, I wondered if all the big changes back and forth in temperature on an average summer day in Tokyo was some sort of Asian health technique, like the cold water bath after a scalding soak at an onsen hot springs bath. Does going back and forth from freezing in stores to sweating on the sidewalk improve blood circulation?
I quickly realized that Tokyo’s hot spaces are kind of embarrassing. People pluck their sweaty clothing away from their skin and wipe their faces with goofy, little towels. So, it always feels like it is politeness that keeps thermostats cranked so low. Casually mention it is hot outside to a taxi driver and they will turn the cold knob to high.
Actually, it is more than just two seasons. My summer commute to school puts me through a global tour of climate zones. It’s ‘temperate’ at home, ‘tropical’ biking to the station, ‘subarctic’ on the train, ‘tropical’ again from station to school, and then inside my classroom, either ‘polar’ (air conditioning fully on in small seminar rooms) or ‘sub-tropical’ (air conditioning half on in lecture halls). I feel sorry for my body having to constantly re-adjust.
Tokyo really needs two summer weather reports, one for inside and one for outside. The inside weather report would announce the average cold in, say, department stores, subway lines and kissaten. Digital maps of Tokyo would be marked for temperature, as they are for traffic, and would tell people how to get from here to there without walking outside in the heat. With that kind of map in hand, some Tokyoites might never go outside all summer.
Japanese always claim to love harmony, but temperature is one issue on which no one ever agrees. Students turn it on. I turn it off. Or I turn it on and they turn it off, when the women all wear short skirts. At meetings, the older professors crank the thermostat to low and pour themselves hot tea. The younger professors suffer in silence. Everyone wears wildly different layers and thicknesses of clothing. Like some game of musical temperature chairs, someone is always left out of the comfort zone.
The temperature segregation of Tokyo summer always makes me wonder about the true nature of the city. Which is the real Tokyo–the cool artificially controlled spaces or the sweltering natural environment? My reaction changes from day to day. Some days I wonder why anyone would be foolish enough to build a major world city in such a tortuous summer climate. And other days, I embrace the heat and try to endure, with the assistance of cold beer and well-placed fans.
In summer, strangely, Tokyo’s cold spaces start to feel the most natural, even though they are the most artificially created. Are people truly themselves only when they are unnaturally comfortable? Tokyoites are able to stand dense crowds, high prices, long commutes, and small living spaces, but somehow cannot stand to shop, sit or walk in a temperature too far from “normal.”
Tokyo’s drive for comfortably cool interior spaces is a big project. More than changing geography by diverting a river or defying gravity to build a skyscraper, Tokyo wants to tame the air to provide comfort for humans. Why not just throw a bubble over the entire city and cool the whole thing? I sometimes wonder.
With the electricity saving campaign started recently, people might have to encourage themselves to get used to not being refrigerated all summer. Even still, the day at the end of the summer when the outside temperature cools and the city’s air-conditioning infrastructure relaxes, what I call “temperature equinox day,” comes as a relief. On that day the city once again feels balanced and whole as Tokyoites return to thoughts other than just the weather and what it does to them.
Sweating It
From Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens (2014)
Channel surfing a couple weeks ago on a hot, humid night, I was surprised at what I saw in an old Japanese film. Two workers were running and stopped along a narrow Tokyo street, sweat pouring off their faces onto their dripping wet shirts. What was surprising was less the melodrama than their profuse sweating captured so clearly by the camera.
Nowadays on current TV, you hardly see a drop of sweat. Cooks have dry white neck towels, lovers running through summer streets apologize at last without a hint of sweat and girls dancing in deodorant ads proudly display armpits dry as a desert. Even beer seems to dry up everyone’s sweat at sunny beach barbecues. Either they film all this in freezer lockers or they use computer graphics to remove all the sweat.
The gritty realism of those vintage black and white films showed real human bodies (and real human emotions) doing what they naturally evolved to do. Even the monsters sweated. The only sweat you see these days is the water radical on the left of the kanji for sweat. It’s strange since sweat seems as basic to the meaning of Tokyo summer as fireworks, cicadas and unagi.
It’s taken me a while to adapt to Tokyo’s summer sweat culture. The look of horror on my students’ faces when I used to come to class drenched in sweat clued me in to the status of sweat. Through the summer, I have four-shirt and even five-shirt days, continually shirking off a wet one for fresh dry ones I keep hidden in my office filing cabinet. Most people stop at a super-cooled coffee shop or wash their faces in the bathroom before anything important in summer. Sweat becomes part of the Tokyo summer routine.
On trains, people prefer standing to sitting in summer, just so clothes can dry off a bit during the ride. Tokyoites, ever polite and ever self involved, even stand in the open areas of trains when really dripping, so as not to make others uncomfortable and have room to dab themselves dry. Leaving a wet spot on the seat cover after sitting, apparently, is the height of public discourtesy.
Never having owned a handkerchief before coming to Tokyo, I now boast quite a collection. One friend confessed to owning 30-some handkerchiefs. With endless patterns, fabrics and sizes to choose from, handkerchiefs are both a good gift and a summer necessity. Like with shirts, I have two, three and even four handkerchief days. But no matter how expensive a designer handkerchief I have, or how many, I always feel just a little childish wiping off sweat, as if my mother should be there to help me.
Air conditioning is everywhere, but it hardly helps. For me, Tokyo’s extensive system of air conditioning freezes more than comforts. Tokyo’s sharp division between indoor ice-cold air con and outside steam-room humidity just confuses my body. I melt like chocolate then stiffen like ice cream, baffled by the sudden, repeated temperature shifts.
There are signs, though, that sweat may be making a comeback, if it was ever really gone. All over the city, young fashionable Tokyoites are paying good money for drenching themselves in sweat. Sweat is now part of the health craze. Hot yoga, still a Tokyo boom, is done in 40-degree rooms. The hot stone beds in Tokyo day spas work like human sweat pumps. In modern-day Tokyo, even sweating can turn a good profit.
Sweat is also kind of sexy. What could be more beautiful than glistening beads of sweat along the nape of a woman’s neck or across the puffy rise of her chest? The few moments of actual visible sweat on TV are usually let-it-all-out singers at the end of a concert. At beer gardens and sidewalk wine cafes, outdoor imbibers seem less inhibited about sweating than they once were. It marks intimacy.
There’s something disruptive about sweating that I really like. Like it or not, pores open with cooling and relieving (if a bit embarrassing) drops of sweat far beyond our planning and control. All the air conditioning in Tokyo, sheer designer fabrics, high-tech deodorants and gift handkerchiefs will never be enough to totally resist the onslaught of heat and humidity.
Sweat is really part of the pleasure of summer, a way of recovering and slowing down, and a way of being very humanly in your–often very wet–skin. While wiping themselves, people always seem on the verge of leaving aside their winter reserve and commenting to complete strangers, “It’s hot, isn’t it?” Just like they do in old movies.
July 8, 2020
Crime Fiction Lover Review of Tokyo Traffic
TOKYO TRAFFIC BY MICHAEL PRONKO
July 8, 2020
Written by nagaisayonara
CFL Rating: 5 Stars
Tokyo is a city like any other, except much much bigger. By some counts it ranks as the world’s largest city, and it’s a place Michael Pronko knows well, as proven by his writing on the subject, which includes his detective Hiroshi mystery books. Tokyo Traffic is third in the series.
Detective Hiroshi is an accidental homicide investigator. Introduced in the two earlier novels, The Last Train and The Moving Blade, Hiroshi is an economics major who studied at Harvard before drifting back to Tokyo and away from his American wife. Obsessed with numbers and fluent in English, Hiroshi finds himself working at the Tokyo metropolitan police, where he thinks not enough people understand numbers or English. Hiroshi spends long nights working, waiting up for phone calls from overseas and poring over spreadsheets of figures. It’s something that continues to put strain on his relationships.
Pronko cuts right to Tokyo’s heart, examining an underworld that few Japanese even would be aware of, or would want to know about. In Tokyo Traffic, he examines the pornography industry, which skirts the boundaries of legality at the best of times and has ties to underworld gangs and human trafficking.
Sukanya is a young Thai woman, little more than a girl really, who was lured to Tokyo with the promise of money and a passport to America. From the rural north of Thailand, she struggled after moving to Bangkok and became easy prey for the human traffickers that sell young women across borders to fulfill male fantasies. Sukanya ends up at Jack and Jill Studios, a porn studio in a warehouse somewhere in Tokyo, with links that run from government officials with a taste for behind the scenes photography to cryptocurrency exchanges and brutal gangsters.
When three people are found brutally murdered at the studio, Hiroshi is the man who sets out to locate the killers, first by tracing the flow of cryptocurrency and then by delving deep into the world in which the criminals operate – a world of high rise apartments and seedy dive bars. But Hiroshi’s not the only one out to find the killers. There’s also Kenta, a mid-level gangster who needs to find out what happened before his bosses realise a computer filled with all of the studio’s secrets has gone missing, along with two of the girls.
One of those missing girls in Sukanya. Completely lost in Tokyo, and terrified of the police as much as she is of the gangsters, she finds herself drawn to Chiho, another outcast on the fringes of Japanese society, living in an internet cafe (the cheapest place to live in Tokyo) and running from her own shady past.
Told in almost-regular alternating chapters between Sukanya, Hiroshi and the gangsters, Tokyo Traffic comes together gradually, building to a slow climax. The who, how and why of the brutal murders that occur in the book’s first pages aren’t explained until very near the last, and the tension remains constant throughout. Alongside that tension there are slowly building layers of backstory, which are fed in slowly and give an insight into the history of all of the characters, good and bad.
I read and reviewed the first two in this series, and am happy to say that Tokyo Traffic is as good as the first two, if not better. It makes for uncomfortable reading at many points, but it’s a necessary discomfort. Tokyo Traffic exposes what is wrong with the new global economy, and does it in the form of a tense, compelling mystery.
For more crime fiction set in Japan, click here.
Raked Gravel Press
Print/Kindle
£5.67
Link to review on Crime Fiction Lover
June 29, 2020
INTERVIEW INDIE CRIME SCENE
INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL PRONKO, AUTHOR OF TOKYO TRAFFIC
Indie Crime Scene
https://indiecrimescene.blogspot.com/2020/06/interview-with-michael-pronko-author-of.html
T
oday it gives the Indie Crime Scene great pleasure to interview award-winning author Michael Pronko, whose new release Tokyo Traffic we featured on June 22.
The story of Tokyo Traffic concerns Sukanya, a young Thai girl who steals a computer while escaping from human traffickers. The traffickers will stop at nothing to get their computer back, and Detective Hiroshi Shimizu investigates a trail of killings. To begin with, tell us about the setting and the inspiration for the book.
It was a moment when I read about human trafficking and thought, how can they get away with something so ancient, brutal and venal in this day and age? Shouldn’t that be done with? It’s one thing to read statistics and another to think of a particular person suffering. Japan’s often late to join international conventions in abuses and crimes, so I thought that should be addressed. But I wanted to consider that from a novelistic perspective. What it would be like to escape into Tokyo and not know how to survive? Who are these people being trafficked? Who are the traffickers? Tokyo’s a very large cage in which to find yourself trapped and running, but who made that cage?
You live in Tokyo and have lived there for twenty years. Can you tell us what brought you there, and why?
Work, money, adventure: the holy triumvirate of motivations. I was working in Beijing for two years and had friends in Tokyo. In a way, it was as simple as that. Tokyo seemed intriguing, such a big place, so hidden and complicated. Why live someplace easy? I regretted that youthful impetuosity many a time but stuck it out. And it was right to follow it through and stay. I found work, I found writing topics, I found friends and fascinating places. That’s enough for anyone.
Your first degree was in philosophy, but you moved on to literature, doing a PhD on Dickens and Film Adaptation at the University of Kent at Canterbury. What led to your growing interest in literature and how has it affected your writing?
Literature is narrativized philosophy. I always loved reading literature, but never thought it was something to study or teach or become a job. Reading literature was just what I did all the time. I still have to laugh when I say to myself, “I have to read this Langston Hughes poem again for work. Woe is me.” How painful is that? It’s not. It’s wonderful to teach literature. It’s like making a career out of eating breakfast or something. I can’t imagine becoming a novelist without teaching a lot of novels, outlining them, discussing them, writing about them. And I can’t imagine teaching without having worked out the complexities of a novel. The two things create synergy, each affecting the other tremendously.
You trained as a teacher, getting an MA in Education, and travelled the world before taking up a teaching job in Beijing at short notice! Where did your travels take you, and what was it like to suddenly find yourself in Beijing?
I loved traveling but it wasn’t a long-term lifestyle choice. I backpacked for years and loved it, but there just comes a time when you want to settle down a bit, go back to the same restaurant twice, know people longer, and more deeply. Living in Tokyo has the excitement of traveling all the time, but the comfort of familiar places and people. I’m fascinated because it’s still a foreign country to me in a lot of ways, yet, the cooks at the ramen shop by my station know me. In the 1980s, Beijing seemed the farthest, most unknown place I could go to. I figured I’d go as far as possible and then work my way back home. I only made it back to Tokyo.
Tokyo Traffic is the third book in the series featuring Detective Hiroshi Shimizu. The first two are The Last Train, published in 2017 and The Moving Blade, published in 2018. What was the inspiration for the series and what led you to crime as a genre?
I chose crime as a genre because I had been writing editorials at Japan Times for a dozen years and wanted to expand on that. Crime novels shouldn’t be overblown editorials. But looking below the surface every week made me wonder how to put the problems into a human context, without the kind of judging, advising, analysing, or ‘editorializing’ that editorials include. I also realized that anything can go into a crime novel. It’s almost infinitely elastic. And yet, it’s also very rigid in the rules that must be followed. So, that tension between all-inclusive openness and patterned storytelling intrigued me. Mystery is basic to human thought. It’s maybe the basic story form, the kernel out of which other story genres emerge. What happens next? That’s our constant thought, about stories and about life. So, that led me to crime, which is basic cause and effect. That’s very philosophical, too. To do that, I wanted a main character who straddles the inside and outside of Japan. Hiroshi is in Tokyo, but not of Tokyo. Once I had his character, I could write.
Tell us more about your protagonist, Hiroshi Shimizu. What challenges does he face in a city like 21st century Tokyo?
In some ways Tokyo is a very advanced, high-tech place. But in other ways, it is rooted in the past and slow to change. Hiroshi spans that divide. He squares off with the old-school, get-it-done approach of Takamatsu. But I think that conflict between their approaches is at the core of Tokyo’s changing nature. Hiroshi turns to his computer first, but Takamatsu hits the streets. Tokyo is an immense place, with forty-some million people in the city and surrounding areas. So, no single person can either know all of the city, nor find it by computer. Hiroshi has to also deal with the virtual city of representations, online connections, and digital economies. Tokyo is very international in ways, but extremely self-referential in others. How to balance those divergent elements? Those are all immense challenges that Hiroshi, and the reader (and the writer), have to negotiate, but those challenges are fascinating.
You have written three award-winning collections of essays about Tokyo: Beauty and Chaos: Essays on Tokyo (Raked Gravel Press 2014), Tokyo’s Mystery Deepens (Raked Gravel Press 2014), and Motions and Moments: More Essays on Tokyo (Raked Gravel Press 2015). Can you tell us about these and how – and if – they relate to your fiction?
Those books were about my experiences living in Tokyo. I wrote several hundred essays for different publications, mostly Newsweek Japan. I collected them to try to create a picture of what life is like here. These are small takes, singular observations with some thoughtfulness packed on top of them. It’s like a Japanese garden, very different from each point of view, with no single point of view being central. I wanted to think through how and why I live here and what it means to me. Fiction is not so different, though the pattern of meaning-making is more drawn out and directed in novel form. I like essays for their quick flips of direction, but I like fiction for its forward drive. The essays formed the basis for thinking about scenes for the novels.
You are a professor of American Literature at Meiji Gakuin University, and have written books in Japanese, and articles for several magazines, including The Japan Times and Newsweek Japan. How has learning Japanese affected your writing in English, if at all?
I think Japanese has affected my writing by making me pay attention to how people communicate in different cultures. The Japanese language can be extraordinarily subtle and ambiguous, and it’s maybe best when it is! But you can’t write a novel with ambiguity and hints. Seeing, reading and hearing things in Japanese every day is a constant input, and stimulus. Having that input, on top of the English I use for classes and friends and writing really changes how I think and see things. It’s not just the language itself, but more how images are used, scenes are paced, actions taken, words used. Writing a novel is “what follows what,” but in Japanese, word order is quite different. Knowing that makes me pay attention to not just language, but the order of events, how questions are asked, or not asked, and when silences can be used. All of that is very influenced by Japanese communicative patterns.
You also write articles about Jazz and run your own website called Jazz in Japan. Please tell us about this.
This is a real passion that I don’t always have enough time to follow through on. I love listening to jazz and writing about it. I’m sure the reason I stayed in Tokyo is because of jazz. I can stop by dozens of clubs along my train journey home to hear great music any night of the week. Some of the clubs are like second homes to me. The jazz world in Tokyo and Yokohama is huge. The musicians are so outstanding. Jazz is the art form that most inspires me. Creating in the moment, virtuosic control of the instrument, the balance of elements, the intense interaction. It resets me and redirects me. I feel jealous of jazz musicians. Writing is so slow and solitary.
Does your writing have a soundtrack, or do you listen to music as you write?
Music definitely helps me write. Writing involves fingers on the keyboard, movements in scenes, a constant flow of story. Music enhances that, fuels and expands that. I loved music and dance from when I was young and if I listen to music it really changes the pace of what I do. I think narrative should be a forward motion where the writer looks at the imagined space and sees bodies and events in motion in certain spaces. How would you do it without a beat, a rhythm, a driving energy? Maybe I’m not strong enough to write without music. It’d be like writing without coffee, or light. At times, I need silence. I don’t always listen to music, but it’s one of the best creative additives for me.
You mention a fondness for legendary SF writer Kurt Vonnegut. How has he influenced you as a writer, and which works of his continue to resonate?
I loved his writing from when I was in my early teens. I’d wander down to the local bookstore and see if there was a new one, ask the clerk. So, for me, he serves as a kind of continuity between my early reading life and my present writing life. I teach “Slaughterhouse-Five” in my seminar nearly every year. It’s my way of putting anti-war themes into the curriculum but also a way of forcing students to “write” their own book from the time-jangled events that spill out of the novel. I think his sense of irony, his simplicity of phrasing, his roundabout narratives are all amazing. He doesn’t try to be realistic, but he ends up being realistic anyway. And he’s funny as hell. Vonnegut’s ethical humanism, for lack of a better description, always knocks me out. Humans are at the center of it all, so we better do better! I couldn’t agree more.
With Tokyo Traffic being the third book in the series, what are you working on now, and will there be further instalments in the series?
I have two more already outlined. The next one is titled, “Tokyo Overtime,” about the workplace in Japan, which can be very brutal and, indeed, murderous. After that, I want to write about the fishing industry and the credit card industry. I think if Hiroshi keeps growing and changing there’s more stories for him. The other two detectives, Takamatsu and Sakaguchi, also are begging for their own standalones.
How do you organise your writing day, and how do you fit writing round your “day job”?
Stay up late, get up early, don’t watch TV. Not so easy, but doable. Weekdays, I write in the morning and set my classes in the afternoon. First half of the week tends to be shorter writing time and more university stuff. Fridays I save for writing only. Saturday and Sunday, I follow the muse or bend to whatever is most pressing. I have paper and pen all over the house, in my bag, in my office, in my pocket, so there are pockets of writing all the time. I think my day job takes time away from writing but gives back insights and inspiration. An unexpected comment from a student can really set my mind working. At times it’s total conflict, end-of-semester grading, for example, but most of the time it produces this productive synergy that I couldn’t live without.
What are you reading now, and what crime novels have been important to you? Or novels generally?
I teach American Literature, so I read a lot for work, contemporary fiction, but also poetry, song lyrics, essays and whatever I feel like teaching. Outside of work, I’m not an exclusive genre reader. I’m totally omnivorous. I do read different crime/mystery/thriller writers to learn how to write, but I learn as much from a novel I don’t like as from one I do. Even a bad novel is instructive. I think reading world classics was very important for, to see how humans have articulated the world in story form. Reading novels from other countries opened up infinite possibilities. Because I teach American literature and write mystery/thriller novels, those tend to predominate, but it’s easy to get stuck repeating the expected. I try not to.
What do you do to relax?
To relax I dream of relaxing. I do find downtime, which is just as important to writing as anything else. I play guitar and piano, and cook, which are all ways of having to focus without my shoulders hunching up tightly. I have a small garden in back of my house, and work on that. Crashing into a lawn chair with a beer after gardening is a small slice of heaven. Especially in Tokyo, to have greenery in your eyes is a luxury. I jog along a small nearby creek and through a huge nearby cemetery with a friend who lives nearby. And of course, I read. But not all at the same time.
https://indiecrimescene.blogspot.com/2020/06/interview-with-michael-pronko-author-of.html
June 24, 2020
Review from SPR Review: Tokyo Traffic by Michael Pronko
Detective Hiroshi returns for another tantalizing dive into the underbelly of Japanese culture and crime in Tokyo Traffic by Michael Pronko. From the seedy dungeons of pornography rings to the beating heart of Tokyo’s moneyed class, this detective thriller is raw and gripping, told by a confident, complex and creative author.
The gruff sleuth at the center of these mysteries is pursuing a new case- a brutal murder tied to the insidious porn and human trafficking rings of Tokyo. It is clear from the start that this is a triggering topic for Hiroshi, something that brings out a primal rage, and that intensity drives much of his revelatory plot line.
However, young Sukanya is captivating in a different way as she navigates unfamiliar streets, one eye always over her shoulder, knowing that influential and merciless powers are hunting her down. She is a born survivor though, armed with both charm and savagery, and is learning how to live on the run, making it up as she goes along.
As these two characters’ journeys converge, the scope of conspiracy swells, forcing them to decide what they want for their future, and what they’re willing to risk to get justice. Sukanya’s connection to Chiho is sweet and charming, while the buddy cop dynamic of Takamatsu, Sakaguchi, and Hiroshi is relatable, though their friendship feels quite unique. The procedural aspects of a detective case combined with the methodical schemes of Sukanya build and maintain tension well; readers know that the culmination of the story is going to be dramatic, and they will not be disappointed.
On the more technical side, Pronko is deeply in tune with emotional language and human connection. Moments of intimacy and closeness are told with the same authenticity as the most gritty and suspenseful passages in the prose. This flexibility and consistent believability in the characters’ interactions is rare, but the realism rarely slips in these pages. Hiroshi becomes even more deeply developed from the first two novels, proving himself to be both intrepid and flawed – a relatable hero that people will want to continue following through his escapades and tireless pursuits.
As has been true for all of the Detective Hiroshi novels, Pronko beautifully captures the alluring and mysterious essence of Tokyo. There is a patience in the writing that mirrors the slower pace of Eastern behavior – a consideration for easily overlooked details and subtle emotions lying just beneath the dialogue. The city itself is a living, breathing character, the result of the author’s two decades living in Japan. Such a thorough immersion in a culture and people allows for an unusually intimate understanding of the cultural nuance and minutiae, which makes reading experience rich and addictive, particularly for those who have no connection to daily life in far-flung places.
As both a love letter to Japan and a bold condemnation of certain human rights crises still alive and well in our modern world, Tokyo Traffic is a superlative addition to the Detective Hiroshi series.
June 21, 2020
Podcast at Mysteries with Character
Podcast Interview with Alexandra Amor at Mysteries with Character
This is a wonderful site dedicated to mysteries, and other books. Alexandra asks interesting questions and gets to the core of writing and of mysteries. Of course, as a writer herself, that’s maybe easier, but her interviews are done with a lot of heart and insight.
Listen to the podcast interview here:
https://alexandraamor.com/murder-memoir-and-music-in-tokyo-with-michael-pronko/
And linger a while to hear the other great interviews she’s done over the years!
Aren’t We All Some Kind of Contradiction? Interview with Literary Titan
Author Interview – Michael Pronko
Literary Titan
In Tokyo Traffic detective Hiroshi is once again called in , to solve a crime that involves human trafficking and crypto-currency scamming. Did you know what criminal themes you were going to use for this novel or did they develop while writing?
The theme was there from the beginning, but only in an abstract way. The concrete actions and decisions of the characters, along with the motivations and results, shaped the themes and made it something to see and touch and feel. The interesting part is how they develop inside the characters. As those broad themes became embodied in the characters, they came alive.
At first the theme of human trafficking threatened to swamp the whole story. It’s too big and too horrible. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how can they get away with that? How can something so vicious and inhumane just keep going? And who’s “they”? Part of the answer is cryptocurrency. Follow the money to where theme meets characters. Some people will cast aside all human feeling for money, and cryptocurrency makes that easier. Its hidden, digital, clean. Of course, the way of the future will probably be all kinds of digital currencies, but the downside is how people use that illicitly, and for such terrible purposes.
This being book three in your series was there anything new you wanted to introduce into Hiroshi’s character?
He moves in with his girlfriend and works at being with her and not sleeping in his office on a pull-out futon. That’s hard work for him. Overall, Hiroshi gets a bit more of his footing in this novel. His skill set is limited, so he bumps against his own limitations, but he learns to pay attention to what he stumbles onto, what he suspects but isn’t sure of, and what others tell him. An intuitive accountant may sound like a contradiction, but aren’t we all some kind of contradiction? We all have that internal division between our different sides.
What were some challenges you set for yourself as a writer with this book?
This one took me a lot longer to finish than the second one. The tricky part was having three main characters. Before I’d always just focused on two. Adding that third one made the story exponentially harder to keep track of. Braiding the three threads of the bad guy, the victim and the detective, plus the people on their side, was tricky. It was like passing a point-of-view baton. The race kept going as each character carried it a bit further. But to me, that’s very Tokyo-like, different kinds of stories flung together.
It was also a challenge to have two young women as main characters. Sukanya doesn’t know Tokyo at all and Chiho knows Tokyo all too well. So, those two different young women and their different views of Tokyo were hard to get right. But I felt their point of view was important. They see the city so differently than I do, but that’s the interesting part. I’m not sure I set those as challenges for myself, writing is enough of a challenge in and of itself, but those became the challenges to tell the story the way I wanted to.
Does Tokyo Traffic end the story for detective Hiroshi or do you have other novels planned?
I have two more in the Hiroshi series already outlined. The one I’m working on right now is titled Tokyo Overtime. It’s about the pressures of the workplace. What other country in the world has a word, karoshi, for death from overwork? After that, I’m planning to write about the whole fish industry, which is very big business in Japan. Two years ago, one of the owners of a sushi chain restaurant paid the equivalent of three million dollars for a single six-hundred-pound bluefin tuna! After that, I have notes for a standalone with sumo wrestler-turned-detective Sakaguchi and Detective Takamatsu is ripe for a prequel about his early, rough days. So, I’ll see where those lead. I’m looking forward to finding out.
Link to interview on Literary Titan
Interview with Literary Titan
Author Interview – Michael Pronko
Literary Titan
In Tokyo Traffic detective Hiroshi is once again called in , to solve a crime that involves human trafficking and crypto-currency scamming. Did you know what criminal themes you were going to use for this novel or did they develop while writing?
The theme was there from the beginning, but only in an abstract way. The concrete actions and decisions of the characters, along with the motivations and results, shaped the themes and made it something to see and touch and feel. The interesting part is how they develop inside the characters. As those broad themes became embodied in the characters, they came alive.
At first the theme of human trafficking threatened to swamp the whole story. It’s too big and too horrible. The more I thought about it, the more I wondered how can they get away with that? How can something so vicious and inhumane just keep going? And who’s “they”? Part of the answer is cryptocurrency. Follow the money to where theme meets characters. Some people will cast aside all human feeling for money, and cryptocurrency makes that easier. Its hidden, digital, clean. Of course, the way of the future will probably be all kinds of digital currencies, but the downside is how people use that illicitly, and for such terrible purposes.
This being book three in your series was there anything new you wanted to introduce into Hiroshi’s character?
He moves in with his girlfriend and works at being with her and not sleeping in his office on a pull-out futon. That’s hard work for him. Overall, Hiroshi gets a bit more of his footing in this novel. His skill set is limited, so he bumps against his own limitations, but he learns to pay attention to what he stumbles onto, what he suspects but isn’t sure of, and what others tell him. An intuitive accountant may sound like a contradiction, but aren’t we all some kind of contradiction? We all have that internal division between our different sides.
What were some challenges you set for yourself as a writer with this book?
This one took me a lot longer to finish than the second one. The tricky part was having three main characters. Before I’d always just focused on two. Adding that third one made the story exponentially harder to keep track of. Braiding the three threads of the bad guy, the victim and the detective, plus the people on their side, was tricky. It was like passing a point-of-view baton. The race kept going as each character carried it a bit further. But to me, that’s very Tokyo-like, different kinds of stories flung together.
It was also a challenge to have two young women as main characters. Sukanya doesn’t know Tokyo at all and Chiho knows Tokyo all too well. So, those two different young women and their different views of Tokyo were hard to get right. But I felt their point of view was important. They see the city so differently than I do, but that’s the interesting part. I’m not sure I set those as challenges for myself, writing is enough of a challenge in and of itself, but those became the challenges to tell the story the way I wanted to.
Does Tokyo Traffic end the story for detective Hiroshi or do you have other novels planned?
I have two more in the Hiroshi series already outlined. The one I’m working on right now is titled Tokyo Overtime. It’s about the pressures of the workplace. What other country in the world has a word, karoshi, for death from overwork? After that, I’m planning to write about the whole fish industry, which is very big business in Japan. Two years ago, one of the owners of a sushi chain restaurant paid the equivalent of three million dollars for a single six-hundred-pound bluefin tuna! After that, I have notes for a standalone with sumo wrestler-turned-detective Sakaguchi and Detective Takamatsu is ripe for a prequel about his early, rough days. So, I’ll see where those lead. I’m looking forward to finding out.
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Booksplainer Review
Paul Burke
Tokyo Traffic by Michael Pronko
A Detective Hiroshi Mystery
Tokyo Traffic is an entertaining and involving crime read. Set in modern-day Japan it is rich in local colour and culture, an intriguing element of the story for Western readers. The unfolding investigation into the dark underbelly of Tokyo life, sex trafficking, and the pornographic film industry, is fascinating, if disturbing. There’s a degree of subtlety in this novel, the story is not only grittily real but also thought-provoking and emotionally alive. It easy to feel for the plight of the central characters, particularly Sukanya, a child trafficked from Thailand to Tokyo’s sex industry. However, some of the villains are rounded too, and more interesting for it. The first novel in The Hiroshi series, The Last Train published in 2017, promised much. Tokyo Traffic, the third in the series is a mature thriller, a nice melding of suspense elements, an engaging detective team, and a mystery with a few twists.
Sukanya stumbles around the film set, drugs still in her system, she throws up. The warehouse has been turned upsidedown, there’s glass on the floor and blood – blood everywhere. Celeste, her only friend, they clung together on the boat from Thailand, is dead. Ratana, the other girl is gone, a man took her away before it happened, they could return at any moment. Sukanya needs to get out of the warehouse now. She approached the two dead men, takes money from their wallets, grabs an iPad and scarpers into the night time city. Sukanya doesn’t knows the streets or the people, she has no passport and barely has any clothes on her back. The film studio owner, Shibaura, waits outside the crime scene for Kenta – Kenta saved the porn film peddler from financial ruin, now he will fix this. They will have to involve the police but first Kento has to track his missing iPad, Kirino will take care to everything else.
Finally the police are alerted to the crime scene. Sakaguchi, a former Sumo wrestler, head of Homicide, allocates the case to Detective Hiroshi Shizumi. There are three dead people, a girl probably underage probably foreign, the film director, (a young man from a wealthy family), and a senior official at the ministry of finance. As the team start looking for witnesses and a motive they have to figure out which one was the target.
Sukanya has money but she doesn’t realise how dangerous the iPad she took is. She can’t book into a hotel, she can’t turn to the police, and the criminals are not the only predators out there for a child alone in the city. She badly needs a friend but who can she trust?
This is the most accomplished of the Hiroshi Mysteries. There’s a real sense of peril in the hunt for Sukanya, who proves to be a very resourceful child. There’s a serious theme underlying the story of a girl lured from her home to Bangkok on the promise of a job only to be abused, beaten, raped and transported to Japan to ‘work’ in the sex film industry. That said, there are moments of humour and real triumph as she manages to avoid falling into the hands of her would be killers.
Michael Pronko is a professor of American Literature and Culture at Meiji Gakuin University in Tokyo. He has written three non-fiction works on Tokyo life. The other novels in the Hiroshi series are The Last Train (2017) and The Moving Blade (2018).
Raked Gravel Press, Paperback, 20th June, ISBN 9781942410195, also available as an eBook.
https://booksplainer.com/2020/06/19/tokyo-traffic/