Kyoto

Stand at the real Kinkaku-ji, burned to the ground in 1950 and rebuilt board by board — the true event Mishima turned into one of postwar Japan's most obsessive novels.

Trace the real Kyoto-area places behind The Tale of Genji: the Otsu temple where Murasaki Shikibu began writing it, a real shrine from the story, and Uji.

Trace Norwegian Wood's real backdrop — the Tokyo campus its narrator almost certainly attends, and the mountain road north of Kyoto that leads toward the sanatorium where Naoko is treated.