Toru Okada Toru's house at the end of the alley
Book One
The story begins in a rented house in a still residential suburb, where a man who has just quit his job is boiling spaghetti when the telephone rings. The house sits at the end of a closed-off lane, the kind of dead-end alley common in the older streets of Setagaya, the western Tokyo ward where the author was living when he wrote the book.
Book One
inferred The novel keeps the house and its neighbourhood unnamed, but the quiet western suburb it describes is Setagaya, where Murakami himself lived; this marks a representative point at the ward centre.
Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗
Toru Okada The alley behind the houses
Book One
A narrow passage runs behind the row of houses, walled at both ends so it leads nowhere, and it becomes the route the narrator walks in search of the missing cat. It is where he first meets the teenage girl from up the street who watches the empty lot with him.
Book One
inferred The passage is a fictional feature of the neighbourhood and is not a named street; this marks a nearby point within Setagaya as a stand-in.
Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗
Toru Okada The abandoned house and the dry well
Book One
Along the alley stands a boarded-up house with an unlucky history and, in its overgrown yard, a well gone dry. The narrator climbs down into it to sit alone in the dark, and the shaft becomes the book's central passage between the ordinary world and something stranger.
Book One, chapter on the empty house
inferred The vacant house with its dry well is invented for the novel; there is no fixed real site, so this marks a representative point within the same Setagaya neighbourhood.
Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗
Toru Okada The neighbourhood shopping street
Book One
The narrator's errands take him to the small covered shopping street near the house, where he does the daily marketing and where the cleaner's and the record shop stand in for the ordinary life he is slowly losing hold of. It reads as one of the neighbourhood shotengai that thread through Setagaya.
Book One
inferred The local shotengai is not named in the text; this marks a representative point on the Setagaya shopping streets the narrator would use.
Google Maps ↗ Street View ↗