A tale of two cities?

March 23, 2008 9:25 PM

Bookfilter: I'm chasing books, stories, novels that prominently feature either Tokyo or Vancouver as settings. Please no Lonely Planet / Pilot Guides...

This year I will be spending about a week in Tokyo and at least 6 months in Vancouver, and I'm looking for examples of literature which feature either (or both) of these cities. Ideally not ABOUT the city, but strongly set in or around.

I'm looking for less of a travel guide and more of a good story which breathes some life into the cities. Having said that I'm not discounting non-fiction entirely. No restrictions on genre, contemporary or historical.

Bonus points for literature featuring both cities.

Thanks for your suggestions!

posted by lych to Media & Arts (20 answers total)

Tokyo Suckerpunch comes to mind.
posted by barnacles at 9:31 PM on March 23, 2008

Douglas Coupland! Girlfriend in a Coma, especially. City of Glass, for nonfiction.
posted by sugarfish at 9:38 PM on March 23, 2008

Any William Gibson?
posted by rokusan at 9:38 PM on March 23, 2008

David Mitchell's Number 9 Dream, and Mo Hayder's The Devil of Nanking. And of course, most anything by Haruki Murakami.
posted by zardoz at 9:39 PM on March 23, 2008

William Gibson's latest, Spook Country has about half the novel taking place in Vancouver
posted by Razzle Bathbone at 9:42 PM on March 23, 2008

Peter Watts' short story "Fractals" paints a ... depressing but vivid picture of the average Vancouver racist*. Not that much information about the city, but it's only a 20-page pdf. A bit of interesting B.C. stuff, as well.

*Of course, by this I mean the (average) (Vancouver racist), not that the average Vancouverite is racist.
posted by Lemurrhea at 9:44 PM on March 23, 2008

Timothy Talyor's Stanley Park is set in Vancouver.
posted by onshi at 9:46 PM on March 23, 2008

I got a third of the way through the Creative Commons licensed Tokyo Zero before I got too annoyed with the writing to continue (the author really does have a way with words sometimes, but it is painfully obvious that the piece has never felt the tempering touch of an editor). Still, it is most definitely "strongly set" in Tokyo, with lots of accurate descriptions of places and culture.
posted by Hollow at 10:16 PM on March 23, 2008

I think any of Haruki Murakami's books could be ok for Tokyo - though I suspect it is not as strong a sense of place as you might like. Worth a read anyway.
posted by AnnaRat at 10:44 PM on March 23, 2008

Hitotoki might interest you. It's a pretty new website that publishes very short (200-500 words) stories about specific places in Tokyo. Not great literature, but many of the stories are footnoted with interesting tidbits about Japanese culture -- fun stuff for a visitor. You can browse the stories in a Google Maps window, which is a nice touch (though all the place-names are in Japanese).
posted by Cucurbit at 10:55 PM on March 23, 2008

Michael Turner's The Pornographer's Poem is set in Vancouver, although it isn't present-day Vancouver.
posted by juv3nal at 12:12 AM on March 24, 2008

Wayson Choy's The Jade Peony is another one set in Vancouver's past.
posted by meadowlands at 12:16 AM on March 24, 2008

Haruki Murakami's Underground: The Tokyo Gas Attack and the Japanese Psyche. Not a novel, but a series of interviews with both victims and perpetrators conducted by a famous Japanese novelist (also recommended by this thread, I notice - I really like Hard-Boiled Wonderland, btw) about the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo Subways. It's an amazing read, and the interviews give you a real sense of place because Murakami is so thorough in asking people about what they were doing - not just on that day, but how they got to that point in life.

Er, but obviously it's a bit depressing.
posted by bettafish at 7:47 AM on March 24, 2008

Ryu Murakami and Banana Yoshimoto are both fascinating Japanese writers; you might enjoy Banana's Kitchen collection of stories.
posted by Unicorn on the cob at 8:28 AM on March 24, 2008

Margaret Lawrence's The Diviners has a few chapters in Vancouver. It is the Vancouver of the sixties, but still I feel it helped me understand the city a bit more, particularly its first-nations underclass. It also happens to be an excellent book.
posted by PercussivePaul at 8:39 AM on March 24, 2008

Vancouver Stories is a collection of short stories about Vancouver edited by Douglas Coupland.

Speed Tribes, by Adam Taro Greenfeld, while extremely dated, also gives a good introduction to Tokyo.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:23 AM on March 24, 2008

Oh, yeah, Alice Munro (included in Vancouver stories) writes a lot about Vancouver, but it's a Vancouver from the late 60s and early 70s.
posted by KokuRyu at 9:24 AM on March 24, 2008

Jay McInerney's Ransom was set in Tokyo
posted by poppo at 1:55 PM on March 24, 2008

Seconding The Vancouver Stories, which I came in to recommend but which KokuRyu got to first. I just finished it and enjoyed it.
posted by roombythelake at 2:12 PM on March 24, 2008

Douglas Coupland, a Vancouver native, has already been mentioned above. But his latest book - J-Pod - is really set in vancouver. You get to learn the name of all the little suburbs, and the neighborhoods where Chinese mafia hangs out, and all that.

Alas, aside from this quip, I can't really recommend the book. I did not enjoy it at all, and I've been known to enjoy a Copland novel once in a great while. I think my track record is having liked 2 out of 5 or six I read, and this isn't one of the two.
posted by blindcarboncopy at 12:34 AM on March 25, 2008