100 Books Like Tokyo Stroll

Japan is known across the world for its amazing hot springs, known as onsen, and the Japanese inns that often house them, called ryokan. Top hot spring towns, such as Hakone and Arima Onsen, are great for first-timers, but there are so many more options. Hundreds, in fact, too many even for an onsen addict like me! 

Finding them all can be pretty exhausting, though, which is where this book comes in handy! It includes guides to 40 of Japan’s best hot springs, from the ones located in lavish 5-star ryokans, to quiet mountainside onsens that require a hike to visit (Tohoku’s were my favorite!).

Many people these days, including myself, like to find travel destinations via Instagram or TikTok, but information on actually visiting these spots can be hard to find.

This handy book shows you how to visit some of the most Instagrammable spots in Tokyo, many of which I had never seen mentioned in the major travel guides.

The most sparsely populated prefecture in Japan is also one of the least visited by foreign tourists. This book is trying to change this, though, and does a splendid job at showing off the best snow spots, volcanic landscapes, and rural hot springs. 

Author Aaron Jamieson has lived on the island for more than a decade, and it shows, as he is able to reveal countless hidden wonders that readers would have never known about if it wasn’t for this book. I’ve used it for two trips up north already, but there is still a lot more to do in the book.

Written by a Kyoto expat of many years, this book is an excellent way to explore all the nooks and crannies of Japan’s ancient capital.

Rich in history, the city is primed for exploration on foot, and this book details 18 strolls, from the top shrines to the city’s infamous backstreets. The super detailed maps and exhaustively researched historical notes really enhanced my last trip to Kyoto, as while I have been there many times, I didn’t actually know much about many of the places!

Transience and the importance of tiny details are two important underpinnings of Japanese culture, and this book captured them beautifully. I love books that use personal stories to tell an overarching epic, and the rise of Tokyo from a little fishing village to one of the biggest cities in the world is just that.

The author’s poetic style also aligns with how thoughts and phrases would evolve in Japanese, making it very evocative. It is a love letter to this city of contradictions and gives a look into the deeper sides that most visitors would simply not think to ask about. 

Written by the 20th century’s leading interpreter of things Japanese, this travel memoir has a timeless, elegiac quality. Donald Richie lived in Tokyo, but he based this work on a series of trips through the waterways and fishing villages of the glittering Inland Sea. Beyond his beautiful sketches of the seascape itself, his warm, human interactions with fishermen, aunties, merchants, and monks give voice to a disappearing side of Japan. They also serve as a mirror into the metaphorical inland sea within himself––the good, bad, and ugly––which he freely reveals. Seeing the world Richie describes vanish evermore in the decades since, the book’s resonance only grows with age. This is why I find myself diving back into it again and again.

Philosopher Roland Barthes visited Japan in the 1960s when it had rebuilt and reinvented itself as a global economic power. Empire of Signs, which he published a few years later, is a profound, yet entertaining reflection on “otherness” and how it helps us see ourselves. I read the slim volume – in the original French – in the plane that took me to Tokyo for the first time. It was a revelation and has inspired me ever since to look for the myriads of little things that fascinate and contradict all preconceived ideas. The book is a wonderful and subtle lesson in seeing the invisible!

Three Assassins almost feels like the movie Bullet Train with Brad Pitt.

It’s a series of seemingly unrelated events that connect a network of assassins together and pit them against one another, knowingly or unknowingly. The novel itself is less about the action and pace and unfurls like a twisted puzzle, making every piece lean into a seemingly surreal universe.

We see all the characters, good and bad, their flaws, good and bad, and the ones we can stand up for, good and bad. “All the knowledge and science that human beings have, it only helps humans.” But even when we’re cheering, I didn’t necessarily know what to believe until I reached the end. Even then, I walked away holding doubts and a smile. 

Like other traditional guidebooks, Essential Japan, aims for almost encyclopedic coverage of its topic, and it successfully manages this without seeming overwhelming—not an easy task judging by other major guidebooks.

In the edition I read, most (but not all) of its “how to” instructions are up to date, but where it really excels is in helping visitors choose what kinds of experiences they would like to have in Japan. For instance, I found its suggested itineraries for Tokyo to be spot-on, and the entire book is rich with recommendations.

Because the book is heavy, I suggest using it to map out your trip itinerary—and then take a lighter reference guide and use online sources for your actual trip.

Tokyo, Form and Spirit was the catalogue for an exhibition at the Walker Center in 1986 with contributions of the most important Japanese urban writers of the 1990s: Henry Smith, Kenneth Frampton, Donald Richie, Marc Treib, Chris Fawcett to name but a few. While I never saw the exhibition, the perspective of the authors created a mental scaffolding that shaped my understanding of the transition from the feudal to modern Japan. Henry

Smith is reading the city of Edo through a bipartite scheme characterized by the sky and the water, or how the city was viewed differently from above, as incarnated by the gaze of the samurai and other authorities, and from below, typically by the commoners who enjoyed life across the city’s waterways. He then searches for this structure in today’s Tokyo where the city’s skyline is dominated by wirescape and high-rise edifices, and the water has almost evaded.… show more.