In Pretty Good Number One, in the chapter Just an American Girl Eating Tokyo Sweets, I talk about sitting in a park eating soy milk ice cream:

Outside a public park one day, a cafe stand did a brisk business selling iced coffee and tea and cones of soy milk (tōnyu) soft cream. My friend Akira shared a bite with me, and as the smooth, earthy stuff melted on my tongue, I thought about the ignominious fate of soy milk in America.

What I didn’t mention, because I couldn’t figure out how it fit into the book, is that this was also the site of my most absurd linguistic mishap of the whole trip.

We were in Kichijōji, a lovely neighborhood in western Tokyo. It was a Sunday, and our friends Akira and Emi joined us for the day, and we strolled through Kichijōji and nearby Inokashira Park. When we were ready to stop off and have a drink, Akira tried to find a cafe that could accommodate five people. He stepped into a several places in succession, and each time he came out and said, “Muzukashii.” It means “difficult,” but it is really the Japanese way of saying, “Not a chance.”

Eventually we came across a small grassy square and got our drinks and soy milk soft serve, and while Akira and Iris played, Emi and I talked about movies. She said her favorite movie was Fight Club. I thought, hey, this is my chance to say something funny in Japanese. So I stood tall and said:

ファイトクラブを話してはいけません！

Emi recoiled. Of course, I was trying to say, “The first rule of fight club is, don’t talk about fight club.” What came out was more like, “Talking about the movie Fight Club is prohibited!”

I could not figure out how to weasel out of this until finally Akira came over and walked me through it. “In the movie…Brad Pitt said…”

Lesson learned: the first rule of Japan is, don’t try to talk about Fight Club.

Pretty Good Number One is now available from most major ebook stores, including Kobo, Amazon, and iBooks. And it’s doing great: it’s been the #1 bestseller in Japanese travel on Amazon for most of the last week.

I particularly enjoyed reading this long, considered review by Yune on Goodreads:

He’s clearly a Japanophile as well as an appreciator of good food at low prices and lovingly describes, along with eel backbones and chicken livers, great food from 24-hour convenience stores, ramen-ordering systems (you pay before you even enter), inadvertently sitting down on restaurant tables rather than on the seats, sending his eight-year-old out to run grocery errands unaccompanied (I was particularly tickled to revisit Iris, who often offers sage commentary such as “If you’re a sumo wrestler, you can do whatever you want. And if someone doesn’t like it, squash goes the person”) — but with a wry self-awareness that shares his fascination rather than over-saturate readers with it.

As you may know, writers love reading books about the craft of writing. It lets us pretend we’re doing our job without actually doing our job. A few years ago, I read the book No Plot? No Problem!, and the piece of advice I took from it was: make a list of things you hate to see in a book and refer to it while writing, because those things will tend to creep into your book like roaches. (If you’re wondering, I didn’t write a novel in 30 days or otherwise.)

For this book, it was a long list. I wanted to avoid unexamined stereotypes, the phrase “the real Japan,” any indication that I really understand Japanese culture, misuse of Japanese vocabulary, and so on. Basically, I wanted to steer clear of anything that would make a reader with a Japanese background say, “Hoo boy, another white guy who thinks he knows everything.” The early reviews suggest that I’ve done okay. Phew!

Some fun blog and media coverage is coming up, plus an enormous post about some of the technical aspects of ebook production, but for now I just wanted to say thank you again for being my most faithful readers and for helping to make this little book a success.

Hey, remember last summer when Laurie and Iris and I went to Tokyo? And remember when I hit you up for money to edit, design, and publish a book about our adventures?

That book, Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo, is available RIGHT NOW.

You can buy it on Amazon for Kindle (or the Kindle app for iPad, phones, PC, Mac, etc).

If you prefer a PDF to read on your computer or print, you can buy it on Scribd.

It’ll be on the iBooks, Kobo, and Sony stores soon (I’ll let you know as soon as it is). No matter where you buy it, it’s $5 for a 240-page book, and almost nothing in it is previously published.

If you’re a Roots and Grubs reader, you’re going to love this book. I’m, like, 99% sure of it. It’s loaded with food, jokes, and stories, like the time we were waiting in line at an eel restaurant and…well, just read the book, okay? Please?

Hey, everyone. Sorry if you’ve already seen this, but my new book–the one I hinted about last July while we were in Tokyo–will be out in June as a full-length ebook (and, a little later, an audiobook).

It’s called Pretty Good Number One: An American Family Eats Tokyo, and I’m currently raising money on Kickstarter to make it great:

Click here to donate, or to just watch the video and read the complete first chapter.

Six days in, I’ve already raised more than I hoped to raise in three weeks. So the book is happening, with professional copy editing, cover design, and a great website. However, it’s not too late to:

• Get your name in the acknowledgments, along with many other cool rewards
• Help fund a US book tour. Want me to come read in a city near you? You know what to do.

Sorry for the blatant commercialism. If you read this blog, I suspect you’re going to love the book, and dozens of you have already donated. Thank you so much for your support.

Few people drive to work in Hong Kong. Owning a car is absurdly expensive and generally restricted to the rich, though the rich are not in short supply here. One day I took the bus to Shek O beach along a stomach-churning mountain road in the southeast corner of Hong Kong Island. At one point, the road was narrowed to one lane by a rockslide, and flaggers controlled the flow of traffic. As the bus passed through, I saw at the head of the line, waiting to travel back into town, a shiny black Rolls-Royce.

Most people, however, get to work (or the beach) by subway, ferry, bus, tram, or…escalator.

The Mid-Levels Escalator is the world’s longest escalator complex. It runs up the slope of Victoria Peak through the Soho and Mid-Levels neighborhoods for about half a mile, cutting a perpendicular swath along dozens of small streets, each sporting shops, indoor and outdoor restaurants, butchers and vegetable sellers. The escalator runs downhill in the morning for commuters coming down the mountain and uphill the rest of the day because the Peak is really, really steep.

The escalator is one story above the street, and at every intersection you can hop off and walk down to street level or, usually, into the second floor of a building. Just when I was getting thirsty, the escalator opened directly into the second floor of a Wellcome supermarket, where I bought a bottle of green tea and browsed the fresh noodle section. Although it’s lit up at night and serves some of HK’s wealthiest neighborhoods, the escalator is anything but deluxe: it’s well worn (55,000 people ride it daily) and feels like a reliable old Honda Civic.

As a people mover, the escalator works like a streetcar: not built for long distance travel but for extending your walk beyond the point where you’d usually poop out. Sure enough, I rode the entire length of the escalator (and kept meeting up with it, sometimes unexpectedly, whenever I was on HK side). I popped into a bookstore, bought a notebook, and admired the selection of chop seals, used throughout much of east Asia as an adjunct to handwritten and electronic signatures. I thought about commissioning a chop seal with the Chinese characters for “soup dumplings,” which would probably be a mildly imperialistic thing to do, but if you’re going to reduce a whole culture to three symbols, I can’t think of three more auspicious ones.