Japanese literature spans two millennia, but in Tokyo dates back only to the 17th-century. Since Tokyo’s emergence as the centre of Japan, however, the city has produced a stream of literary innovation. Some of its foremost writers like Haruki Murakami are now global brands. Alternatively the striking, sometimes dystopian visions of a future Tokyo depicted in the popular manga comic genre have also struck a chord worldwide.
Tokyo’s film industry exploded in the postwar era, with studios including Daiei, Nikkatsu, Shochiku and Toho giving rise to dramatic directors like Akira Kurosawa and animators such as Hayao Miyazaki, who thrust Japanese cinema onto the world map. Tokyo also succumbed to the predations of Godzilla, and provided the backdrop for a number of English-language films including the 2003 Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson vehicle Lost In Translation. The latter brought renewed attention to Tokyo as an atmospheric location not only for film but for countless music and YouTube videos.
Books
Fiction
Botchan, Natsume Soseki (1906). A youthful teacher struggles to live a moral life and ultimately finds himself via a sojourn in the countryside.
Naomi, Junichiro Tanizaki (1924). Sexually frank Naomi bewitches an older man in this depiction of the loss of traditional gender roles amid encroaching Westernisation.
Snow Country, Yasunari Kawabata (1935–7). Japan’s first winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature tells the story of an ill-fated affair between an urban elite and rural courtesan.
A Personal Matter, Kenzaburo Oe (1964). Peace activist and author Oe’s semi-autobigraphical novel about a family dealing with their disabled son earned Japan a second Nobel Prize.
Woman in the Dunes, Kobo Abe (1964). A man becomes marooned in a village surrounded by sand and eventually embraces his fate in this Japanese modernist classic.
Sea of Fertility, Yukio Mishima (1969-71). Mishima depicted tragic love in this tetralogy – and then took his own life by sword attempting to engineer a rightwing coup in 1970.
Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami (1987). In recent decades Murakami has become the international face of Japanese literature on the strength of delicate yet fantastical pop fiction works like Norwegian Wood.
Samurai Boogie, by Peter Tasker (1999). Private eye Kazuo Mori investigates the underbelly of the city. Check out the more recent Dragon Dance, also set in Tokyo.
Non-fiction
Low City, High City: Tokyo From Edo to the Earthquake, Edward Seidensticker (1983). The entrancing history of how the city transformed from Shogun’s capital to a modern metropolis.
Speed Tribes, Karl Taro Greenfeld (1994). Profiles of Tokyo’s subterranean youth culture amid the go-go Bubble years.
Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, John W. Dower. The MIT history professor’s account of Japan’s rise from the ashes of WWII is a masterfully empathic retelling of the Tokyo war crimes trials and the unusual relationship between MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito.
Tokyo Stories: A Literary Stroll, translated and edited by Lawrence Rogers (2002). An anthology of stories by Japanese writers with Tokyo settings.
Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan, Jake Adelstein (2009). The memoir of Adelstein’s years in Tokyo as the first non-Japanese reporter on the crime beat for one of Japan’s largest newspapers is to begin filming in 2015, with Daniel Radcliffe in the lead role.
Film
Tokyo Story (1953). Yasujiro Ozu’s story about the generation gap transposes into a meditation on mortality.
Seven Samurai (1954). Akira Kurosawa’s classic made a star of Toshiro Mifune as one of seven unemployed samurai recruited to defend a poor village from bandits.
The original Godzilla
Alamy
Godzilla (1954). Ishiro Honda’s mythic monster emerges from the sea, incensed at the testing of nuclear bombs, to wreak havoc on Tokyo.
You Only Live Twice (1967). Lewis Gilbert’s Bond movie with Sean Connery, features Japanese actors and Tokyo locations, including Hotel New Otani in Akasaka and Yoyogi Stadium.
Akira (1988). Katsuhiro Otomo’s animated cyberpunk thriller portraying a dystopian Tokyo in the year 2019 has become a certified cult classic.
Cult anime Akira
Alamy
Ring (1998). Hideo Nakata’s horror mystery follows a reporter and single mother who is entangled in a series of deaths related to a cursed video tape. The film spawned a host of western remakes.
Battle Royale (2000). Kinji Fukasaku’s last film stars Takeshi Kitano as a boy dealing with the death of his father who is forced to compete in a game where students must kill each other to win.
Spirited Away (2001). Hayao Miyazaki’s portrait of children who enter a Japanese netherworld was the country’s highest-grossing film of all time, and won a 2003 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Lost In Translation (2003). Sofia Coppola dramatises the closeness that develops between two Americans who find themselves adrift in Tokyo.
Like Father, Like Son (2013). Hirokazu Koreeda’s depiction of the bonding between two families whose sons are switched at birth won the director a Jury Prize at the Cannes Film Festival.