Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko by Gordon Vanstone
What You Are looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
Novel with a Gothic twist set in WARWICK
Ten Great Books set in TOKYO
17th March 2025
Ten great books set in Tokyo. The city, a sprawling metropolis, seamlessly blends tradition and modernity. Its neon-lit skyscrapers tower over ancient temples, creating a captivating juxtaposition. The city pulses with energy, from the bustling Shibuya crossing to the serene gardens of the Imperial Palace.
Culturally, Tokyo offers a rich variety. Traditional arts like Kabuki theatre and tea ceremonies coexist with vibrant pop culture, anime, and manga. The culinary scene is a global sensation, ranging from Michelin-starred restaurants to humble ramen shops.
There is a myth that Tokyo is an expensive place to visit. It is not. In recent years the exchange rate has moved very much to the benefit of Western visitors.
Here are ten of our favourite books set in thus fascinating city:
Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko by Gordon Vanstone
A delightfully debauched, spiritual quest through a hallucinatory Japan of cursed gaijin houses, seedy hostess bars, a Beatles-themed McDonalds, mysterious internet cafe denizens, and one seriously pissed off cat.
After three years in Japan, Fred Buchanan is broke, unemployed and engaged in a telepathic turf war with a feral cat behind an Okinawa convenience store. Thus begins his metaphysical odyssey back to Tokyo and search for meaning beyond the earthly path followed.
Along the way, symbols and sages materialise in the form of a two-fingered jazz musician, the faded tattoo on an ex-yakuza lover, the kite flyer of Kabukicho and Yukie, an alluring hostess with strips of delicious thigh and strange power imbued in the etched eye on her fingernail.
Charging through Shinjuku’s neon jungle, enveloped in a boozy, nicotine-stained haze, past and present collide as an empty orchestra croons a slow dance of people and place, memory and madness, loss and love. All the while, Fred struggles to be an agent of his destiny and not another ball bearing bouncing through the cosmic pachinko.
Rainy Day Ramen and the Cosmic Pachinko is told as a uniquely clever mix of Murakami-esque magical realism and gonzo Japan travelogue. Nimbly structured and loosely presented as a modern mash-up of Homer’s Odyssey and Murasaki Shikibu’s The Tale of Genji.
Tokyo on Foot by Florent Chavouet
This prize-winning book is both an illustrated tour of a Tokyo rarely seen in Japan travel guides and an artist’s warm, funny, visually rich, and always entertaining graphic memoir.
Florent Chavouet, a young graphic artist, spent six months exploring Tokyo while his girlfriend interned at a company there. Each day he would set forth with a pouch full of color pencils and a sketchpad, and visit different neighborhoods. This stunning book records the city that he got to know during his adventures. It isn’t the Tokyo of packaged tours and glossy guidebooks, but a grittier, vibrant place, full of ordinary people going about their daily lives and the scenes and activities that unfold on the streets of a bustling metropolis.
Here you find businessmen and businesswomen, hipsters, students, grandmothers, shopkeepers, police officers, and other urban types and tribes in all manner of dress and hairstyles. A temple nestles among skyscrapers; the corner grocery anchors a diverse assortment of dwellings, cafes, and shops―often tangled in electric lines.
What You Are looking for is in the Library by Michiko Aoyama
Sayuri Komachi is no ordinary librarian. Sensing exactly what someone is searching for in life, she provides just the book recommendation to help them find it.
In this uplifting book, we meet five of Sayuri’s customers, each at a different crossroads:
– the restless retail assistant eager to pick up new skills
– the mother faced with a demotion at work after maternity leave
– the conscientious accountant who yearns to open an antique store
– the gifted young manga artist in search of motivation
– the recently retired salaryman on a quest for newfound purpose
Can she help them find what they are looking for?
Blue Light Yokohama by Nicolás Obregón
Setagaya ward, Tokyo: Inspector Kosuke Iwata, newly transferred to Tokyo’s homicide department, is assigned a new partner and a secondhand case.
Blunt, hard as nails and shunned by her colleagues, Assistant Inspector Noriko Sakai is a partner Iwata decides it would be unwise to cross.
A case that’s complicated – a family of four murdered in their own home by a killer who then ate ice cream, surfed the web and painted a hideous black sun on the bedroom ceiling before he left in broad daylight. A case that so haunted the original investigator that he threw himself off the city’s famous Rainbow Bridge.
Carrying his own secret torment, Iwata is no stranger to pain. He senses the trauma behind the killer’s brutal actions. Yet his progress is thwarted in the unlikeliest of places.
Fearing corruption among his fellow officers, tracking a killer he’s sure is only just beginning and trying to put his own shattered life back together, Iwata knows time is running out before he’s taken off the case or there are more killings . . .
Last Stop Tokyo by James Buckler
Alex thought running away would make everything better. Six thousand miles from the mistakes he’s made and the people he’s hurt, Tokyo seems like the perfect escape. A new life, a new Alex.
The bright lights and dark corners of this alien and fascinating city intoxicate him, and he finds himself transfixed by this country, which feels like a puzzle that no one can quite explain. And when Alex meets the enigmatic and alluring Naoko, the peace he sought slips ever further from his grasp.
After all, trust is just betrayal waiting to happen and Alex is about to find out that there’s no such thing as rock bottom. There’s always the chance it’ll get worse . .
The Silent Dead by Tetsuya Honda
Twenty-seven-year-old Detective Reiko Himekawa has an impressive ability to solve crimes. When a gruesomely slaughtered body wrapped in plastic is discovered, Reiko soon uncovers eleven other murders with a similar ‘signature’ and a reference to something called ‘strawberry night’, a group that recruits victims and murderers on the internet. To solve the case, Reiko is forced to reach back into her own troubled past.
The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide
A couple in their thirties live in a small rented cottage in a quiet part of Tokyo. They work at home as freelance writers. They no longer have very much to say to one another.
One day a cat invites itself into their small kitchen. She is a beautiful creature. She leaves, but the next day comes again, and then again and again. New, small joys accompany the cat; the days have more light and colour. Life suddenly seems to have more promise for the husband and wife; they go walking together, talk and share stories of the cat and its little ways, play in the nearby Garden. But then something happens that will change everything again.
The Guest Cat is an exceptionally moving and beautiful novel about the nature of life and the way it feels to live it. Written by Japanese poet and novelist Takashi Hiraide, the book won Japan’s Kiyama Shohei Literary Award, and was a bestseller in France and America.
The Cherry Blossom Murder by Fran Pickering
Behind the scenes a killer is lurking… When Tokyo-based Londoner Josie finds a body under the cherry blossom, she sets out to track down the killer. But she finds that everyone has a secret and no one can be trusted as the questions pile up. What is sinister Ms Kato up to? Who is the strange man who waited for the victim and does glamorous actress Tammy know more than she should? And who could get through the locked door? Josie must shatter the smooth surface of Japanese life to solve the puzzle and stop the fan club killer striking again.
Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
The Japanese bestseller: a tale of love, new beginnings, and the comfort that can be found between the pages of a good book.
When twenty-five-year-old Takako’s boyfriend reveals he’s marrying someone else, she reluctantly accepts her eccentric uncle Satoru’s offer to live rent-free in the tiny room above his shop.
Hidden in Jimbocho, Tokyo, the Morisaki Bookshop is a booklover’s paradise. On a quiet corner in an old wooden building, the shop is filled with hundreds of second-hand books. It is Satoru’s pride and joy, and he has devoted his life to the bookshop since his wife left him five years earlier.
Hoping to nurse her broken heart in peace, Takako is surprised to encounter new worlds within the stacks of books lining the shop.
And as summer fades to autumn, Satoru and Takako discover they have more in common than they first thought. The Morisaki bookshop has something to teach them both about life, love, and the healing power of books.
Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
Enjoy our selection of Tokyo books!
Tony for the TripFiction team
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