The Best Tokyo Books (About And Set In)

“What are the best books about or set in Tokyo?” We looked at 90 of the top Tokyo books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 11 titles, all appearing on 2 or more “Best Tokyo” book lists, are ranked below by how many lists they appear on. The remaining 50+ titles, as well as the lists we used are in alphabetical order at the bottom of the page.

Happy Scrolling!

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Top 12 Books About Tokyo

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11 .) Coin Locker Babies by Ryu Murakami

Lists It Appears On:

• Frommers
• Tor

“A surreal coming-of-age tale that establishes Ryu Murakami as one of the most inventive young writers in the world today.

Abandoned at birth in adjacent train station lockers, two troubled boys spend their youth in an orphanage and with foster parents on a semi-deserted island before finally setting off for the city to find and destroy the women who first rejected them. Both are drawn to an area of freaks and hustlers called Toxitown. One becomes a bisexual rock singer, star of this exotic demimonde, while the other, a pole vaulter, seeks his revenge in the company of his girlfriend, Anemone, a model who has converted her condominium into a tropical swamp for her pet crocodile.”

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10 .) Dance Dance Dance (The Rat, #4) by Haruki Murakami

Lists It Appears On:

• Frommers
• Goodreads

High-class call girls billed to Mastercard. A psychic 13-year-old dropout with a passion for Talking Heads. A hunky matinee idol doomed to play dentists and teachers. A one-armed beach-combing poet, an uptight hotel clerk and one very bemused narrator caught in the web of advanced capitalist mayhem. Combine this offbeat cast of characters with Murakami’s idiosyncratic prose and out comes Dance Dance Dance

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9 .) In the Miso Soup by Ryu Murakami

Lists It Appears On:

• Frommers
• The Guardian

It is just before New Year’s. Frank, an overweight American tourist, has hired Kenji to take him on a guided tour of Tokyo’s sleazy nightlife on three successive evenings. But Frank’s behavior is so strange that Kenji begins to entertain a horrible suspicion: that his new client is in fact the serial killer currently terrorizing the city. It isn’t until later, however, that Kenji learns exactly how much he has to fear and how irrevocably his encounter with this great white whale of an American will change his life.

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8 .) Kokoro by Natsume Sōseki

Lists It Appears On:

• Frommers
• Goodreads

Hailed by The New Yorker as “rich in understanding and insight,”Kokoro — “the heart of things” — is the work of one of Japan’s most popular authors. This thought-provoking trilogy of stories explores the very essence of loneliness and stands as a stirring introduction to modern Japanese literature.

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7 .) Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Travel Associates

Toru, a quiet and preternaturally serious young college student in Tokyo, is devoted to Naoko, a beautiful and introspective young woman, but their mutual passion is marked by the tragic death of their best friend years before. Toru begins to adapt to campus life and the loneliness and isolation he faces there, but Naoko finds the pressures and responsibilities of life unbearable. As she retreats further into her own world, Toru finds himself reaching out to others and drawn to a fiercely independent and sexually liberated young woman.

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6 .) Tokyo Rising – The City since the Great Earthquake

Lists It Appears On:

• Frommers
• Japan Visitor

With his deep feeling for Japanese literature and long personal acquaintance with Tokyo, Edward Seidensticker was able to evoke the early years of modern Tokyo in Low City, High City. Here he tells the even more startling and colorful story of how Tokyo rose from ruins — twice — to become Asia’s greatest metropolis.

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5 .) Tokyo Underworld by Robert Whiting

Lists It Appears On:

• Japan Visitor
• The Culture trip

In this unorthodox chronicle of the rise of Japan, Inc., Robert Whiting, author of You Gotta Have Wa, gives us a fresh perspective on the economic miracle and near disaster that is modern Japan.

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4 .) Tokyo Vice: An American Reporter on the Police Beat in Japan by Jake Adelstein

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Tokyo Cheapo

“From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique, firsthand, revelatory look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up.

At nineteen, Jake Adelstein went to Japan in search of peace and tranquility. What he got was a life of crime . . . crime reporting, that is, at the prestigious Yomiuri Shinbun. For twelve years of eighty-hour workweeks, he covered the seedy side of Japan, where extortion, murder, human trafficking, and corruption are as familiar as ramen noodles and sake. But when his final scoop brought him face to face with Japan’s most infamous yakuza boss—and the threat of death for him and his family—Adelstein decided to step down . . . momentarily. Then, he fought back.”

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3 .) Number9dream by David Mitchell

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• The Guardian
• Tor

David Mitchell follows his eerily precocious, globe-striding first novel, Ghostwritten, with a work that is in its way even more ambitious. In outward form, number9dream is a Dickensian coming-of-age journey: Young dreamer Eiji Miyake, from remote rural Japan, thrust out on his own by his sister’s death and his mother’s breakdown, comes to Tokyo in pursuit of the father who abandoned him. Stumbling around this strange, awesome city, he trips over and crosses—through a hidden destiny or just monstrously bad luck—a number of its secret power centers. Suddenly, the riddle of his father’s identity becomes just one of the increasingly urgent questions Eiji must answer. Why is the line between the world of his experiences and the world of his dreams so blurry? Why do so many horrible things keep happening to him? What is it about the number 9? To answer these questions, and ultimately to come to terms with his inheritance, Eiji must somehow acquire an insight into the workings of history and fate that would be rare in anyone, much less in a boy from out of town with a price on his head and less than the cost of a Beatles disc to his name.

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2 .) Out by Natsuo Kirino

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• The Culture trip
• Travel Associates

“Natsuo Kirino’s novel tells a story of random violence in the staid Tokyo suburbs, as a young mother who works a night shift making boxed lunches brutally strangles her deadbeat husband and then seeks the help of her co-workers to dispose of the body and cover up her crime.

The ringleader of this cover-up, Masako Katori, emerges as the emotional heart of Out and as one of the shrewdest, most clear-eyed creations in recent fiction. Masako’s own search for a way out of the straitjacket of a dead-end life leads her, too, to take drastic action.

The complex yet riveting narrative seamlessly combines a convincing glimpse into the grimy world of Japan’s yakuza with a brilliant portrayal of the psychology of a violent crime and the ensuing game of cat-and-mouse between seasoned detectives and a group of determined but inexperienced criminals. Kirino has mastered a Thelma and Louise kind of graveyard humor that illuminates her stunning evocation of the pressures and prejudices that drive women to extreme deeds and the friendship that bolsters them in the aftermath.”

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1 .) After Dark by Haruki Murakami

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• The Culture trip
• The Guardian
• Travel Associates

“A short, sleek novel of encounters set in Tokyo during the witching hours between midnight and dawn, and every bit as gripping as Haruki Murakami’s masterworks The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Kafka on the Shore.

At its center are two sisters—Eri, a fashion model slumbering her way into oblivion, and Mari, a young student soon led from solitary reading at an anonymous Denny’s toward people whose lives are radically alien to her own: a jazz trombonist who claims they’ve met before, a burly female “love hotel” manager and her maid staff, and a Chinese prostitute savagely brutalized by a businessman. These “night people” are haunted by secrets and needs that draw them together more powerfully than the differing circumstances that might keep them apart, and it soon becomes clear that Eri’s slumber—mysteriously tied to the businessman plagued by the mark of his crime—will either restore or annihilate her.”

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The 50+ Additional Best Books Set In Tokyo

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#	Book	Author	Lists
(Titles Appear On 1 List Each)
12	1Q84	Haruki Murakami	Goodreads
13	A Clean Kill in Tokyo (John Rain, #1)	Barry Eisler	Goodreads
14	A Modern History of Japan: From Tokugawa Times to the Present		Frommers
15	A Tale for the Time Being	Ruth Ozeki	Goodreads
16	A Wild Sheep Chase (The Rat, #3)	Haruki Murakami	Goodreads
17	Almost Transparent Blue	Ryu Murakami	The Culture trip
18	And Then		Frommers
19	Anthology of Japanese Literature		Frommers
20	Best of Tokyo		Japan Visitor
21	Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage	Haruki Murakami	Goodreads
22	Cool Tokyo Guide: Adventures in the City of Kawaii Fashion, Train Sushi and Godzilla		Japan Visitor
23	Cruising the Anime City: An Otaku Guide to Neo Tokyo	Patrick Macias	The Culture trip
24	Debt of Honor (Jack Ryan Universe, #8)	Tom Clancy	Goodreads
25	Eating in Japan		Frommers
26	Edo, The City That Became Tokyo: An Illustrated History		Japan Visitor
27	Everyday Life in Traditional Japan		Frommers
28	Feel and Think: A New Era of Tokyo Fashion	Various Authors	The Culture trip
29	Flesh and the Mirror from Fireworks	Angela Carter	The Guardian
30	Geisha in Rivalry: A Tale of Life, Love and Intrigue in the Shimbashi Geisha Quarter	Kafu Nagai	The Guardian
31	Ghostwritten	David Mitchell	Goodreads
32	Hardboiled Wonderland And The End of the World	Haruki Murakami	Tor
33	Introduction to Japanese Culture,		Frommers
34	Japan: The Story of a Nation		Frommers
35	Japanese Family & Culture.		Frommers
36	Japanese Today: Change and Continuity		Frommers
37	Kata		Tokyo Cheapo
38	Kitchen	Banana Yoshimoto	Goodreads
39	Life in Tokyo: The Way People Live		Frommers
40	Living Japanese Style		Frommers
41	Lonely Planet Tokyo		Japan Visitor
42	Lonely Planet’s Best of Tokyo 2018		Japan Visitor
43	Love	Hideo Furukawa	Tor
44	Low City, High City		Frommers
45	Martial Arts & Sports in Japan		Frommers
46	Model Misfit (Geek Girl, #2)	Holly Smale	Goodreads
47	Modern Japanese Stories: An Anthology		Frommers
48	People Who Eat Darkness: The Fate of Lucie Blackman	Richard Lloyd Parry	Goodreads
49	Ranma ½, Vol. 1 (Ranma ½ (US 2nd), #1)	Rumiko Takahashi	Goodreads
50	Ring (Ring, #1)	Kōji Suzuki	Goodreads
51	Rurouni Kenshin, Vol. 1: Meiji Swordsman Romantic Story (Rurouni Kenshin, #1)	Nobuhiro Watsuki	Goodreads
52	Rurouni Kenshin, Volume 03	Nobuhiro Watsuki	Goodreads
53	Sailor Moon, Vol. 1 (Sailor Moon, #1)	Naoko Takeuchi	Goodreads
54	Salaryman in Japan		Frommers
55	Salvation of a Saint	Keigo Higashino	Goodreads
56	Sanshiro	Soseki Natsume	The Culture trip
57	Shōgun (Asian Saga, #1)	James Clavell	Goodreads
58	South of the Border, West of the Sun		Frommers
59	Spring Snow (The Sea of Fertility)	Yukio Mishima	The Guardian
60	Subway Guide to Tokyo		Japan Visitor
61	Tabloid Tokyo 2		Frommers
62	Tabloid Tokyo: 101 Tales of Sex, Crime, and the Bizarre from Japan’s Wild Weeklies		Frommers
63	The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture		Frommers
64	The Donald Richie Reader: 50 Years of Writing on Japan		The Guardian
65	The Guest Cat	Takashi Hiraide	Goodreads
66	The Hare With Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance	Edmund de Waal	The Guardian
67	The Idiot	Ango Sakaguchi	The Culture trip
68	The Japanese Mind: The Goliath Explained		Frommers
69	The Japanese Today		Frommers
70	The Scarlet Gang of Asakusa	Yasunari Kawabata	The Guardian
71	The Street of a Thousand Blossoms	Gail Tsukiyama	Goodreads
72	The Sword Thief (The 39 Clues, #3)	Peter Lerangis	Goodreads
73	The Tale of Genji	Murasaki Shikibu	Travel Associates
74	The Thief	Fuminori Nakamura	Tor
75	The Waiting Years		Frommers
76	The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle	Haruki Murakami	Goodreads
77	Tokyo 1955-1970: A New Avant Garde	Various Authors	The Culture trip
78	Tokyo City Atlas: A Bilingual Guide		Japan Visitor
79	Tokyo Encounter		Japan Visitor
80	Tokyo Pub Crawler		Japan Visitor
81	Tokyo Realtime: Akihabara		Japan Visitor
82	Tokyo Story		Tokyo Cheapo
83	Tokyo with Children		Tokyo Cheapo
84	Tokyo, the City at a Glance (Wallpaper City Guide Tokyo)		Japan Visitor
85	Tokyo: A Cultural History		Frommers
86	Tokyo: A Spatial Anthropology	Hidenobu Jinnai	The Culture trip
87	Tune in Tokyo: The Gaijin Diaries	Tim Anderson	Travel Associates
88	What’s What in Japanese Restaurants		Tokyo Cheapo
89	Who Is Mr Satoshi?	Jonathan Lee	The Guardian
90	Winter in Tokyo	Ilana Tan	Goodreads

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8 Best Tokyo Book Sources/Lists

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Source	Article
Frommers	Recommended Books, Films & Music in Tokyo
Goodreads	Tokyo
Japan Visitor	Tokyo Books
The Culture trip	10 Books Set in Tokyo: Reading the Motley City
The Guardian	10 of the best books set in Tokyo
Tokyo Cheapo	Books on Tokyo
Tor	Five Great Genre-Bending Novels Set in Post-1970s Tokyo
Travel Associates	Books & Films Set In Tokyo