Mapped
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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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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