Mapped
Black Rain
Masuji Ibuse
Years after the atomic bombing, Shigematsu Shizuma reconstructs from his diary the days after 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima, as he tries to clear his niece Yasuko, who was caught in the radioactive black rain, of the suspicion of illness that is ruining her marriage prospects. Ibuse maps the real catastrophe: the city on the morning of the bomb, the hypocenter and the ruined streets, the rivers of the Ota delta filled with the dead as the black rain falls, and the quiet country village where the survivors wait, years later, for sickness to declare itself.
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Kokoro
Natsume Sōseki
A young student befriends an older man he calls Sensei, a recluse burdened by a guilt he will not name, until a final confession reveals how, years before, Sensei betrayed his friend K over the woman he loved, and how K's suicide has shadowed his life ever since. Set against the death of the Meiji Emperor, Sōseki maps a real Tokyo and its edges: the Kamakura beach where student and Sensei first meet, the university and the walks of the capital, the lodging house of the old betrayal, and the cemetery where Sensei tends K's grave.
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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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Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
The Osaka of a Korean family who cross the strait and never quite arrive: the Ikaino ghetto where they are packed into a lane of tin-roofed houses, and the Tsuruhashi market where the women build a life from a kimchi cart and, in time, a sweets stall. The book's Osaka is a working city of tenements and railway arches; its edges reach back to Busan and forward to Yokohama.
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Silence
Shusaku Endo
The Nagasaki coast in the 1640s, during the shogunate's campaign to stamp out Christianity. Two Portuguese Jesuits land in secret and shelter with the hidden Christians of the Sotome fishing villages and the offshore Goto Islands, before capture carries them to the city, its magistrate and the fumie. The map runs from the Sotome shore north of the city, out to the Goto Islands, and into Nagasaki itself.
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Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata
Kawabata's snow country is a hot-spring town on the west side of Honshu, reached from Tokyo by a train that runs south to north through a long mountain tunnel and comes out into deep Niigata snow. The map draws on the real onsen town of Yuzawa: the station, the bathhouses and inns on the slope, the cedars of the shrine, and the border tunnel that opens the book.
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The Makioka Sisters
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The slow decline of a genteel Osaka merchant family in the years before the Second World War, told through four sisters and the long, failing effort to find a husband for the shy third sister, Yukiko. The Kansai world is exact: the comfortable house at Ashiya between Osaka and Kobe, the fading main family house in old Osaka, the modern port city of Kobe, and the annual pilgrimage to see the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, the still point of the family's year.
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The Sound of the Mountain
Yasunari Kawabata
Kamakura, the old seaside capital, where one sleepless night the aging Shingo Ogata hears a deep sound from the wooded hills behind his house and takes it for a summons. He commutes to a Tokyo office along the line north, so the map runs from the temple town to the gardens of the capital.
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The Sound of Waves
Yukio Mishima
Mishima's simple, luminous love story is set on Uta-jima, a small fishing island in Ise Bay drawn from the real island of Kamishima, where the young fisherman Shinji and the diver's daughter Hatsue fall in love against a tide of gossip. The whole island is the book: the fishing village and its harbour, the steep stone steps of the Yashiro shrine to the sea god, the lighthouse on the height, and the sea itself, worked by the boats and the diving women.
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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Yukio Mishima
Mishima's novel reworks a real event: the burning of the Golden Pavilion, Kinkaku-ji, by a young acolyte monk in 1950. The stammering, ugly Mizoguchi comes from a poor coastal temple to serve at Rokuon-ji in Kyoto, and his worship of the pavilion's unbearable beauty curdles until he destroys it. The city is real throughout: the gilded pavilion above its pond, the temple grounds where he lodges, Otani University where he meets the crippled cynic Kashiwagi, and the wartime and postwar streets of Kyoto.
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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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