“Mysterious, unfathomable, and unutterable as the mystic experience itself is, the road that leads to it should not be.”
— Eugen Herrigel, The Method of Zen

Walking in Place 3: Tokyo extends the path of Tucson-based artist Mike Slack’s previous two volumes (on New Orleans and Berlin, both newly republished) into the gently sunlit corners and cul-de-sacs of Japan’s largest city — an incomprehensibly vast megalopolis teeming with unexpected zones of quietude, sensuality, and humor. Along Slack’s seemingly aimless trajectory we detect transcendental order within the flux of a chaotic megacity. Calm amidst density, the relief of nothingness in an endless sea of things. Our gaze tilts upward to survey vast architectures; spans outward to note unlikely curvatures, stairwells, and domestically scaled structures; hones downward at oblique tile-work, odd human flourishes, cats, shadowplay, the fine grain of the city. In this playful yet exacting sequence, Tokyo folds in on itself to reflect its curious, utterly unique ambience. The underpinnings of Metabolism – the mid-century Japanese avant-garde movement – seem relevant here: the way Slack renders it, the city is an organism in constant flow, decay, and renewal; where the jewels of perception and life can reveal themselves, if only we can free the mind’s eye to amplify — and simplify — the world. As with the first two books in Slack’s ongoing serial project, Walking in Place 3: Tokyo is less a city guide than a pocket-sized psychic map, an open proposition for gentle collisions of mind, body, and urban space. In Tokyo, we consider the liminal space between contemplation and nonchalance, and the fruit that such a state can bear.