Mapped
Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
The late-1960s Tokyo a middle-aged narrator looks back on: a spartan men's dormitory near Waseda, the record shops and drinking alleys of Shinjuku, and long aimless walks with Naoko out from Yotsuya along the old outer moat toward Iidabashi. A quieter, grieving city under the student unrest of the decade.
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
Murakami's Tokyo is the quiet western suburb of Setagaya: a house at the end of a blind alley, a dry well in an empty lot, a small shopping street where an unemployed man goes looking first for a cat and then for a wife who has walked out of his life. From this stillness the book opens onto the west-side plaza at Shinjuku and, in memory, onto a war in Manchuria far outside the city. The map holds the suburban core and reaches east to Shinjuku.
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