Sansho the Bailiff (Sanshō Dayū) follows Anju and Zushiō, two noble children sold into slavery, from Naoetsu in Niigata to Tango in northern Kyoto and back to Sado Island. Mizoguchi's 1954 film and Mori Ōgai's 1915 story both retell an older oral tale.
The route runs from the Naoetsu bridge where the family is torn apart, through Yura and the Tango Kokubunji to Kyoto and Sado, and ends on Mount Iwaki, where Anju's memory lives on. The legend is fictional, so most pins are approximate.
Urashima Tarō, Japan's fisherman who visits the Dragon Palace, is tied to the Tango Peninsula in Kyoto Prefecture, where Urashima Shrine in Ine keeps his story, and to rival claims in Okinawa, Yokohama and the Kiso Valley.
The route follows the tale from its 8th-century Tango roots through the undersea palace to the opened box, then visits the places that say he lived or ended up there. Most links are local legend, and each stop says how firm it is.
K-On! never names its setting, but its anime borrows from real places: Toyosato's Vories school buildings in Shiga, the Eizan railway stations of Kyoto, and a cafe in London's Earl's Court.
The route follows the light music club from its high school through Kyoto's commuter stations and training-camp trains to the graduation trip in London. Some links are fan identifications, and Kyoto Animation denies the school one.
Akito wakes after a traffic crash in a Shibuya emptied by a masked occultist's fog, sharing his body with the spirit KK and able to see the Marebito that now fill the streets. Tango Gameworks built the district as a condensed, walkable stage rather than a straight copy, keeping landmarks, borrowing back streets and folding in a few districts from elsewhere in Tokyo.
The route follows the game from the scramble crossing and the station through Center Gai, Dōgenzaka and the 109 stand-in, then north to a borrowed Yanaka Ginza and across town to the Tokyo Tower finale. Pins mark the real places; the game's map moves some of them closer together.
Jorge Luis Borges is the writer who turned a library into a metaphor for the universe, yet his own life ran through very real places in Buenos Aires: a poor Palermo childhood, a basement library job, and eighteen years as director of the National Library.
This route follows him from his birthplace barrio and a famous café to the two library buildings he knew, with one fictional stop: the Calle Garay house where "The Aleph" sees everything at once.
Agent 47 has killed his way across the world in the Hitman trilogy, from a Paris fashion show to a skyscraper in Dubai. Behind the levels stand real cities, a real tower and a few real places that inspired invented ones.
This route follows nine missions from the 2016 game to Hitman 3. Most venues are fictional, so the pins mark the city or the real place the designers named as a model, and each stop says which.
A stranger who looks foreign joins two writers at Patriarch's Ponds, predicts a death, and Moscow's strangest spring begins. In Bulgakov's novel the devil, as Woland, visits Soviet Moscow with a retinue that includes the cat Behemoth and the henchman Azazello, while Margarita bargains with him for the Master.
The route follows the Moscow chapters in order: the ponds where it all starts, a writers' club, a haunted flat, a stage show, a flight of revenge, a ball, a terrace beside the Kremlin and a farewell on the Sparrow Hills. Several places are invented or only inspired by real ones, and each stop says which.
The Motorcycle Diaries follows Ernesto Guevara and Alberto Granado's 1952 journey from Buenos Aires across South America — Valparaíso, the Chuquicamata copper mine, Machu Picchu, the San Pablo leper colony on the Amazon — to Caracas. Their overloaded Norton died in Chile; the poverty they saw on the way changed Guevara.
Guevara's diary of the trip, published decades later as The Motorcycle Diaries, records how poverty, exploited miners and the lepers they worked with changed him; within a few years he was "Che", a leader of the Cuban Revolution. The route follows the journey from both men's accounts as summarised by historians.
