Tabi Tales

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Haruki Murakami

One of the most internationally recognized Japanese novelists. His Tokyo — jazz bars, quiet cafés, city walks — is a recurring backdrop across his fiction.

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.

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.