One thing I love about perusing the classics of world literature is the geographical accuracy of certain titles, which often gives you the chance to follow in the footsteps of your favourite protagonists.

Why not just walk around the literary city with a novel in one hand and your phone in the other?

Of course, tourist boards across the world love this sort of thing, and many have gone to the trouble of providing tours of the relevant locations, pointing out everything you need to know about the struggles of characters X, Y, and Z, without requiring any prior knowledge of the book in question.

That’s the easy route, which is all well and good. But now in the age of online and mobile maps, cross-referencing and navigation is child’s play. Why not just walk around the literary city with a novel in one hand and your phone in the other? Mobile navigation is now free after all. It’s a blast – just watch out for pedestrian crossings, that’s all.

Here’s a few of our favourite towns as immortalised in fiction. Some very famous examples here, and some less so.

The Bloomsday book

The most extreme example of what we’re talking about would be James Joyce’s Dublin, as plotted out with startling, encyclopedic accuracy in Ulysses. This is a book perhaps more talked about than read, but don’t be scared – perhaps just start with the more accessible (and more entertaining) short story collection The Dubliners.

Trekking around Dublin in the footsteps of Ulysses’ Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom has become something of an obsession for many literary-minded visitors to the city, and the culmination of this tendency is Bloomsday, a yearly event taking place on the very day painstakingly detailed in this mammoth book: the 16^th of June. As you can imagine, it’s tours and events a-plenty, with not a little Guinness involved.

Visitors at any other time of year should hit the James Joyce Centre (35 North Great George’s Street) for maps, tour details, and more info than any sane man could handle about one of the 20^th century’s greatest authors.

A murderer’s lodgings?

There’s no reason to consider a literary tour of Raskalnikov’s Saint Petersburg a crime, nor indeed a punishment. (Sorry – couldn’t resist!) However, the most interesting and controversial location in relation to the book is the contested site of Raskolnikov’s apartment. Fans have gone into some detail as to their reasoning, as Lonely Planet details:

This innocuous house on the corner of Stolyarny per (called ‘S… lane’ in the book) is one of two possible locations of the attic apartment of Rodyon Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. Those who claim that this is the place go further, saying that Rodyon retrieved the murder weapon from a street-sweeper’s storage bin inside the tunnel leading to the courtyard.

When you’re finished making your own analysis, why not spend a while investigating the trajectory and velocity of the magic bullet?

The spirit of bebop laid to rest in Tokyo

Haruki Murakami has come to international renown as an accessible and popular representative of postmodern Japanese culture. His relaxed style and witty, acerbic tone has made him an international bestseller to boot.

Chasing down the suburban streets in which Murakami’s protagonists search for their lost dog is not going to be terribly rewarding…

For the foreign visitor to Japan, chasing down the suburban streets in which Murakami’s protagonists search for their lost dog, or chow down on late-night fast food, is not going to be terribly rewarding. But to get deeper into the spirit of this author’s work, I would seriously advise the interested fan to check out Kichijoji.

This area, along with its various suburbs, is the setting for much of Murakami’s fiction. It’s a rather relaxed, downtempo choice in comparison to much of Tokyo, popular with the twenty- and thirty-something set keen on jazz, coffee, and a good book. In fact, Murakami himself used to run a jazz club in Kichijoji, and an engagement with music of all kinds runs through his work. Take a while to explore the bookshop-lined back streets, enjoy a stroll in the gorgeous Inokashira Park – within an hour or two, you’ll be deeply immersed in the same atmosphere that permeates books like The Wind-up Bird Chronicles.