TPW 2026: Mythologizing Tokyo Workshop

Tokyo is always abuzz with inspiration and during Tokyo Poetry Week the buzz seems to intensify. We always try to host workshops that help our community turn the excitement and inspiration into writing. On April 11, we had our now regular ekphrasis workshop, but to close out the festival, Joy Waller led a workshop titled "Mythologizing Tokyo" in which poets thought of the city as a magical place of legends.

Here is Joy herself looking back at the event:

-written by Joy Waller

When Zoria approached me to ask if I’d facilitate a creative writing workshop on the final day of Tokyo Poetry Week, I was

a) ecstatic and b) knew exactly which direction I wanted to explore: how to guide poets and other writers in mythologizing Tokyo, my intoxicating home for close to two decades. 

Around the time I first moved to Tokyo in the mid-aughts, one of my favorite bands was Of Montreal. I had them on repeat through my headphones as I ventured out on ever-longer voyages of discovery throughout this incredible, overwhelming, VAST metropolis. Everything was electrified with the buzzing neon energy of the city, and I rapidly grew obsessed with the shriek of cicadas (it was summer), the monolithic skyscrapers, the hushed inner-city ponds, and the way the moonlight seemed to have a different glow on this side of the world. 

I didn’t immediately realize it, but I was collecting the early symbols that would dominate my creative work in the decades to come. 

The Of Montreal song I listened to most often was The Past is a Grotesque Animal. 

The whole track is spectacular but I listened to it mostly for this thrilling lyric: 

"Sometimes I wonder if you’re mythologizing me like I do you... Mythologizing me like I do you"

I considered these words akin to a sacred text. (I still do.) A magical directive. If we love something, we wish to immortalize it, and as a writer, elevation to myth is the obvious choice. 

From this point on, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously, I mythologized every person, place, and experience I came into contact with. Thousands of myths were written about hundreds of subjects… 

I was also tantalized and haunted by a true titan of mythmaking lore, Carl Jung, who believed that the most important question anyone can ask is: What myth am I living?

And I’ve come to realize that this question cannot be answered by thinking: it can only be answered by being. And in some cases, by doing. And for a writer? By writing.

We started the Mythologizing Tokyo workshop at Hagukumu Kohan, a cozy café in Shimokitazawa, where participants shared favorite myths from our diverse cultures of origin and discussed the rich symbolism of Tokyo. We then moved through six guided writing exercises designed to light up the imagination and evoke the genesis of a new mythology.

Then we took off on a “hero’s journey”: a 30-minute walk to the next venue in which all of the fragments we’d written began to simmer within us — essentially, our mythological potion brewing. We observed Tokyo through new eyes on this brief journey, taking photos of anything we felt seemed symbolic, or like a portal, or divine, and that could be used in our final writing session.

Once we arrived at the second venue, Good Heavens pub, participants had 30 minutes of dedicated writing time in which to weave all the fragments, insights, and photos they had collected into the beginnings of a new personal mythology. We closed the workshop by sharing selections from our work. 

It was deeply inspiring to hear how different yet connected everybody’s interpretations and written fragments were. I like to think each of us were one page closer, as Carl Jung urged us, to identifying what myth we are living.

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If this got you all jazzed up & curious and you’d like to attend a similar event, the fiction writer Brian Wood-Koiwa and I have teamed up to create Urban Writing Haus, where we offer weekly creative writing workshops in Tokyo (and online in the future!) on topics ranging from ensouling the urban mundane to deifying the conbini as a sacred space. 

You can learn more about Urban Writing Haus and our upcoming July studios here: www.urbanweird.com/studios

Also, for the bold & curious, you can explore more about me, my poetry books, my literary editorial services, and more here: www.joywaller.com.

I’m also on Insta (https://www.instagram.com/joyous.waller) and

Substack (https://substack.com/@joyouswaller).