Tabi Tales

Authors We Follow

Tabi Tales is an independent, unofficial fan project. We are not affiliated with or endorsed by any of the authors, publishers, or rights holders mentioned below.

Haruki Murakami
One of the most internationally recognized Japanese novelists. His Tokyo — jazz bars, quiet cafés, city walks — is a recurring backdrop across his fiction.
A Wild Sheep ChaseNorwegian WoodKafka on the Shore1Q84

Places connected to Haruki Murakami

HokkaidoKantoTokyoKansaiKyoto
Junichiro Tanizaki
Tanizaki lived out much of what he wrote in Naomi: in the early 1920s he moved to Yokohama's Westernized Yamate district and took up the same ballroom dancing and fashion he later gave his characters, before the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake forced him to relocate to the Kansai region.
A Portrait of ShunkinNaomi

Places connected to Junichiro Tanizaki

KansaiOsakaKantoTokyoKanagawa
Masuji Ibuse
Ibuse wrote about ordinary lives with a dry, understated humor across a long career, most famously in Black Rain (1966) — built from a real atomic-bomb survivor's diary rather than an invented account.
Black Rain

Places connected to Masuji Ibuse

ChugokuHiroshima
Murasaki Shikibu
A lady-in-waiting at the Heian-era imperial court around the year 1000, and the author of The Tale of Genji — widely considered the world's first novel. Little is known of her real life beyond her own diary and the court records of the time; even "Murasaki Shikibu" is a later nickname, not her birth name, which was never recorded.
The Tale of Genji

Places connected to Murasaki Shikibu

KansaiKyotoShiga
Natsume Soseki
Widely considered the most important novelist of modern Japan. His novels map onto real places he lived and taught — from a Shikoku bathhouse to a Tokyo cemetery where he's actually buried.
SanshiroKusamakuraKokoroI Am a CatBotchan

Places connected to Natsume Soseki

KantoTokyoKyushuKumamotoKanagawa
Osamu Dazai
Dazai's memoir Tsugaru retraces his rural hometown in northern Japan, from his family's preserved mansion in Kanagi to the remote coastal village of Kodomari.
No Longer HumanReturn to Tsugaru

Places connected to Osamu Dazai

KantoTokyoKanagawaTohokuAomori
Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Often called the father of the Japanese short story, and the namesake of the Akutagawa Prize, Japan's top literary award for new writers. Spinning Gears, one of his last works, was finished weeks before his 1927 suicide, and reads as a near-direct record of the paranoia that consumed him.
Spinning Gears

Places connected to Ryunosuke Akutagawa

KantoTokyo
Tatsuhiro Oshiro
Oshiro grew up in central Okinawa under the decades of U.S. military administration that followed the war, and became the first Okinawan-born author to win the Akutagawa Prize, for Cocktail Party in 1967.
Cocktail Party

Places connected to Tatsuhiro Oshiro

Okinawa
Yasunari Kawabata
In 1968, Kawabata became the first Japanese writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, cited in part for Snow Country. He was a repeat visitor to the hot-spring town of Yuzawa starting in 1934, and wrote parts of the novel in a room at the inn where he stayed.
Snow Country

Places connected to Yasunari Kawabata

ChubuNiigata
Yukio Mishima
One of postwar Japan's most internationally read novelists, and a lifelong obsessive about beauty and destruction. The Temple of the Golden Pavilion turns the real 1950 arson of Kyoto's Kinkaku-ji into a novel about a mind consumed by the thing it loves.
The Temple of the Golden Pavilion

Places connected to Yukio Mishima

KansaiKyoto