The Book of Tokyo

Author: Hideo Furukawa
Publisher: Comma Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 204

Book Description
A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’

Tokyo on Foot

Author: Florent Chavouet
Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
ISBN: 1462906400
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 216

Book Description
This prize-winning book is both an illustrated tour of a Tokyo rarely seen in Japan travel guides and an artist's warm, funny, visually rich, and always entertaining graphic memoir. Florent Chavouet, a young graphic artist, spent six months exploring Tokyo while his girlfriend interned at a company there. Each day he would set forth with a pouch full of color pencils and a sketchpad, and visit different neighborhoods. This stunning book records the city that he got to know during his adventures. It isn't the Tokyo of packaged tours and glossy guidebooks, but a grittier, vibrant place, full of ordinary people going about their daily lives and the scenes and activities that unfold on the streets of a bustling metropolis. Here you find businessmen and women, hipsters, students, grandmothers, shopkeepers, policemen, and other urban types and tribes in all manner of dress and hairstyles. A temple nestles among skyscrapers; the corner grocery anchors a diverse assortment of dwellings, cafes, and shops--often tangled in electric lines. The artist mixes styles and tags his pictures with wry comments and observations. Realistically rendered advertisements or posters of pop stars contrast with cartoon sketches of iconic objects or droll vignettes, like a housewife walking her pet pig, a Godzilla statue in a local park, and an urban fishing pond that charges 400 yen per half hour. This very personal guide to Tokyo is organized by neighborhood with hand-drawn maps that provide an overview of each neighborhood, but what really defines them is what caught the artist's eye and attracted his formidable drawing talent. Florent Chavouet begins his introduction by observing that, "Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities." With wit, a playful sense of humor, and the multicolor pencils of his kit, he sets aside the question of urban ugliness or beauty and captures the Japanese essence of a great city in this truly vital portrait.

Emergent Tokyo

Author: Jorge Almazan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781951541323
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Book Description
This book examines the urban fabric of contemporary Tokyo as a valuable demonstration of permeable, inclusive, and adaptive urban patterns that required neither extensive master planning nor corporate urbanism to develop. These urban patterns are emergent: that is, they are the combined result of numerous modifications and appropriations of space by small agents interacting within a broader socio-economic ecosystem. Together, they create a degree of urban intensity and liveliness that is the envy of the world's cities. This book examines five of these patterns that appear conspicuously throughout Tokyo: yokocho alleyways, multi-tenant zakkyo buildings, undertrack infills, low-rise dense neighborhoods, and the river-like ankyo streets. Unlike many of the discussions on Tokyo that emphasise cultural uniqueness, this book aims at transcultural validity, with a focus on empirical analysis of the spatial and social conditions that allow these patterns to emerge. The authors of Emergent Tokyo acknowledge the distinct character of Tokyo without essentialising or fetishising it, offering visitors, architects, and urban policy practitioners an unparalleled understanding of Tokyo's urban landscape.

Tokyo

Author:
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 9780811824231
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 452

Book Description
Documents the myriad ways that urban dwellers respond to the space crunch. Four hundred color photos take you inside the habitations of artists, students, young professionals, and families. -- Back cover.

Tokyo Ueno Station (National Book Award Winner)

Author: Yu Miri
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0593187520
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193

Book Description
WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR A surreal, devastating story of a homeless ghost who haunts one of Tokyo's busiest train stations. Kazu is dead. Born in Fukushima in 1933, the same year as the Japanese Emperor, his life is tied by a series of coincidences to the Imperial family and has been shaped at every turn by modern Japanese history. But his life story is also marked by bad luck, and now, in death, he is unable to rest, doomed to haunt the park near Ueno Station in Tokyo. Kazu's life in the city began and ended in that park; he arrived there to work as a laborer in the preparations for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics and ended his days living in the vast homeless village in the park, traumatized by the destruction of the 2011 tsunami and shattered by the announcement of the 2020 Olympics. Through Kazu's eyes, we see daily life in Tokyo buzz around him and learn the intimate details of his personal story, how loss and society's inequalities and constrictions spiraled towards this ghostly fate, with moments of beauty and grace just out of reach. A powerful masterwork from one of Japan's most brilliant outsider writers, Tokyo Ueno Station is a book for our times and a look into a marginalized existence in a shiny global megapolis.

Tokyo

Author: Ashley Evanson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1524792349
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 9

Book Description
Hello, Tokyo! Touch the snow as it falls quietly on Mt. Fuji. This board book series pairs early learning concepts with colorful, stylish illustrations of the iconic art, architecture, food, and culture of cities around the world. Both children and adults are sure to love these hip and charming books! In Tokyo, you can use all your senses while discovering the city: smell cherry blossoms in beautiful gardens, taste sushi at the fish market, and feel peaceful inside a temple.

Tokyo Like a Local

Author: DK Eyewitness
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0744055318
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
Experience authentic Tokyo with this insider's e-guide Home to glimmering skyscrapers, timeless traditions, and one of the world's most exciting art scenes, this trendy city is endlessly enticing. But beyond the monumental Tokyo Tower and lavish Imperial Palace lies the real Tokyo: a whole other realm waiting to be explored. We've spoken to the city's locals to unearth the coolest hangout spots, hidden gems, and personal favorites to ensure you travel like a local. Join the after-work crowd in the ultimate karaoke sing-along, eat and drink into the night at a tiny Japanese tavern, and get your geek on shopping at treasure troves of anime merch. Whether you're a local looking to uncover your city's secrets or seeking an authentic experience beyond the tourist track, this stylish e-guide makes sure you experience Tokyo beneath the surface.

Neighborhood Tokyo

Author: Theodore C. Bestor
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 0804717974
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 752

Book Description
In the vastness of Tokyo these are tiny social units, and by the standards that most Americans would apply, they are perhaps far too small, geographically and demographically, to be considered "neighborhoods." Still, to residents of Tokyo and particularly to the residents of any given subsection of the city, they are socially significant and geographically distinguishable divisions of the urban landscape. In neighborhoods such as these, overlapping and intertwining associations and institutions provide an elaborate and enduring framework for local social life, within which residents are linked to one another not only through their participation in local organizations, but also through webs of informal social, economic, and political ties. This book is an ethnographic analysis of the social fabric and internal dynamics of one such neighborhood: Miyamoto-cho, a pseudonym for a residential and commercial district in Tokyo where the author carried out fieldwork from June 1979 to May 1981, and during several summers since. It is a study of the social construction and maintenance of a neighborhood in a society where such communities are said to be outmoded, even antithetical to the major trends of modernization and social change that have transformed Japan in the last hundred years. It is a study not of tradition as an aspect of historical continuity, but of traditionalism: the manipulation, invention, and recombination of cultural patterns, symbols, and motifs so as to legitimate contemporary social realities by imbuing them with a patina of venerable historicity. It is a study of often subtle and muted struggles between insiders and outsiders over those most ephemeral of the community's resources, its identity and sense of autonomy, enacted in the seemingly insubstantial idioms of cultural tradition.

Dodsworth in Tokyo

Author:
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547877455
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 53

Book Description
Dodsworth's duck companion is surprisingly well-behaved during a visit to Tokyo, although he does fall into the koi pond at the Imperial Palace and becomes the center of attention at a Sanja Festival.

Tiny Tokyo

Author: Ben Thomas
Publisher: Chronicle Books
ISBN: 1452137552
Category : Photography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Anyone who has ever set foot in Tokyo or dreamed of seeing its kaleidoscopic wonders will fall in love with this totally unique tour of the beautiful megalopolis. Here are all the spectacular sights of the great big Japanese capital, made tiny enough to fit in a pocket! This teeny tome collects incredible bird's-eye views of the bustling cityscape, all shot using a distinctive photographic technique known as "tilt-shift" that has the effect of seeming to shrink its subjects— making one of the vastest cities in the world look like a miniature model. Epic skyscrapers, crowded city streets, and even sumo wrestling matches resemble tiny plastic toys in this one-of-a-kind little book.