Literary Travel Guides

Follow the real Osaka pharmacy district behind Tanizaki's A Portrait of Shunkin (Shunkin Sho) — including the shrine that still marks the novella's setting with its own stone monument.

Understand the real scale of U.S. base presence behind Oshiro's Cocktail Party — Okinawa's first Akutagawa Prize winner — at the sites where that presence is still impossible to ignore today.

Trace the real Hokkaido towns behind Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase — from the remote village widely believed to have inspired its fictional 'Twelve Falls Town' to the sheep-farming town where Murakami did his own research.

Follow the real diary behind Ibuse's Black Rain — from Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park to the small Chugoku mountain town where the survivor whose journal inspired the novel was born.

Follow the real 1920s Tokyo-to-Yokohama world behind Tanizaki's Naomi (Chijin no Ai) — including the Yamate hillside where the author himself lived out the novel's Westernizing obsessions.

Walk Sanshiro's own route onto the University of Tokyo's Hongo campus — through the gate the novel names outright, to the pond that now carries its title character's name.

Trace the real hot-spring village behind Natsume Soseki's Kusamakura — a remote corner of Kumamoto Prefecture where a Meiji-era villa, its mirror pond, and an old mountain road still match the novel almost exactly.

Trace the real beach where Kokoro's narrator meets Sensei and the Tokyo cemetery where the novel's saddest chapters play out — the same cemetery where Natsume Soseki himself is buried.

Trace the real house, neighborhood, and even the actual cat's grave behind Natsume Soseki's I Am a Cat — from a quiet Tokyo backstreet to a relocated Meiji-era house 300km away in Aichi Prefecture.

Trace the real Matsuyama locations behind Natsume Soseki's comic novel Botchan — from the bathhouse he barely disguised in fiction to the schoolyard where he actually taught — with practical travel notes for visiting Shikoku.

Trace Norwegian Wood's real backdrop — the Tokyo campus its narrator almost certainly attends, and the mountain road north of Kyoto that leads toward the sanatorium where Naoko is treated.

Trace Kafka on the Shore's run from Tokyo to Takamatsu — and visit the real Shikoku building fans have long proposed as the closest match to its fictional private library.

Find the real emergency staircase off Tokyo's Shuto Expressway where Aomame climbs down into an altered world at the start of 1Q84 — now one of the most visited real-world Murakami sites in Tokyo.

Trace the real Tokyo and Kamakura settings behind Dazai Osamu's No Longer Human — from the coastal cape where his own life nearly ended to the Mitaka neighborhood where he wrote the book and is buried.

Trace the real places behind Dazai Osamu's memoir Tsugaru — from his family home in Kanagi to the coastal town of Kodomari — with practical travel notes for international visitors.