Patrick Süskind's Perfume follows Jean-Baptiste Grenouille, born in Paris in 1738, with a gift for scent and no scent of his own. His path runs from the Innocents cemetery to a mountain cave, and then to Grasse, where his craft turns murderous.
The route follows the book from Paris to the Plomb du Cantal, Montpellier and Grasse, and ends in Barcelona, where Tom Tykwer's film rebuilt Paris. Only a few places are named exactly; the rest are approximate.
Inō Tadataka measured Japan on foot, from his brewer's house in Sawara and the Tomioka Hachiman shrine in Fukagawa to Mount Hakodate and Nihonbashi. In ten surveys from 1800 he and his team paced the country's coasts, and maps based on his work were still in use in 1924.
The route follows his life in places: the brewer's house at Sawara, the shrine where he prayed before the first survey, Mount Hakodate and the far end of that journey in Hokkaido, Nihonbashi, his grave and the shrine that honours him. The surveys were separate expeditions, so the stops are not one connected walk.
In July 1497 four ships left Lisbon to find a sea route to India. Vasco da Gama's fleet crossed the open South Atlantic, rounded the Cape, worked its way up the African coast, and reached Calicut on 20 May 1498. The voyage ended with two ships and over half the men lost.
The route follows the voyage from the Restelo shore in Lisbon to Calicut, then home via Anjediva and the Azores. Landing sites are mostly debated or only broadly known, so most pins are approximate. Dates are as the sources give them, in the Julian calendar then in use.
In 1878 Isabella Bird, then 46, travelled from Tokyo to Hokkaido and described the journey in letters to her sister, published as Unbeaten Tracks in Japan.
The route follows her dated letters from the landing at Yokohama through Nikkō and the northern river towns to an Ainu village in Hokkaido. Town pins are approximate; the inns and houses she slept in are not located.
Haruhi Suzumiya never names its city: it is Nishinomiya in Hyogo, with North High on Nishinomiya Kita High School, the SOS Brigade's café on Coffee-ya Dream, stops at Kōyōen and Mount Kabuto. The story follows Kyon and a classmate's club for aliens, time travellers and espers.
The route visits the real places that served as models: the school, two stations, a riverside park, a mountain and Koshien Stadium. Story place names are altered, so most pins mark a model, not a set.
Detective Conan is the story of a teenage detective shrunk to a child's size, and its author comes from a small coastal town in Tottori, Japan. Gosho Aoyama was born in Daiei, now part of Hokuei, and the town has turned itself into Conan Town.
The route visits the birthplace, the Conan-themed station, the bridge, the manga museum and the airport that carries Conan's name. The sources do not tie any story scene to these places, so the stops mark the town's own tributes.
After the 2016 earthquakes, Kumamoto Prefecture and One Piece creator Eiichiro Oda, who comes from the prefecture, answered with ten bronze statues of the Straw Hat Pirates, set up in towns across the region.
The route visits them in the order they were unveiled, from Luffy at the prefectural office in 2018 to Jinbe by the sea in 2022, and tells why each crew member was sent where. The statues are real places to visit; the "Hino Country" story around them is the project's own.
In the autumn of 1600 two armies met at Sekigahara to decide who would hold power after Toyotomi Hideyoshi. One day in the fog gave Tokugawa Ieyasu a decisive victory and put him on the road to the shogunate.
The route follows the campaign from the siege of Fushimi to the castles of Mino, the field of Sekigahara, the fall of Mitsunari's Sawayama and his burial in Kyoto, and ends at Edo Castle in 1603. Dates inside Japan's old calendar are labelled as such.
In September 1799 the Russian field marshal Suvorov led his army into Switzerland to join the Allied forces, only to find his allies failing him. He fought through the Alps, crossed high passes and ended in Chur.
The route follows the march from Taverne to Chur. Dates are Gregorian (New Style), and pins mark villages or passes rather than battlefields.
Tolstoy's novel begins on a Moscow railway platform and ends on another. Between them Levin finds Kitty on a skating pond, Anna meets Vronsky off a train, and the lovers' story runs through snowstorms, a racecourse and a spa town before they flee to Italy.
The nine stops follow the novel's order across Russia, Germany and Italy. Tolstoy rarely names the buildings, so most pins mark the station or town the scene points to.
The Butterfly Lovers runs from Zhu Yingtai's home in Shangyu and the school in Hangzhou to Liang Shanbo's temple and tomb in Ningbo. The girl who studied disguised as a boy is betrothed to another man; when Liang dies, the earth opens at his grave and the two fly away as butterflies.
The route follows the tale from the heroine's home in Shangyu, to the school in Hangzhou, to the Ningbo temple and tomb, then to a rival claim in Yixing and a statue in Verona. Every Chinese site is local tradition rather than proven history.
A poet who nearly lost his head for his verses, Su Shi (Su Dongpo) was banished to Huangzhou, Huizhou and Hainan, and wrote some of his best work in exile.
The route follows his life in order, from his family home in Sichuan through the 1079 trial, three places of banishment, and his death at Changzhou in 1101. Several stops are rebuilt memorials or city-level markers, and each says so.
Between 1405 and 1433 the Ming court sent a fleet from Nanjing across the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean, seven times, under the admiral Zheng He. It came home with ambassadors and exotic animals.
This route follows the sequence from the shipyard in Nanjing through Java, Malacca, Ceylon, Calicut and Hormuz to Malindi in East Africa, and ends at his empty tomb. Most ports are approximate pins, and later temple traditions are marked as such.
Sun Wukong is born from a stone on a flowery mountain and later guards a monk on the long road west to fetch the sutras. The novel is set on the road to India, but its geography is almost entirely fantasy.
This route follows five episodes in the novel's order and pins the real places that share their names or were later tied to them. Some are named in the text; Huaguo Shan and the Flaming Mountains are linked only by later tradition.
Oath brothers, a hermit strategist, a bridge held by one man and a battle on the Yangtze: the classic novel turns the fall of the Han dynasty into a saga of loyalty and cunning. This route follows Liu Bei from a peach garden to his deathbed.
The novel is fiction built on the Records of the Three Kingdoms. Each stop says what the novel tells, what the record says, and which places are linked to the story only by later tradition, such as the Zhuozhou temple and the disputed Red Cliffs.
Game Science scanned real Chinese temples, pagodas and statues to build Black Myth: Wukong, and most of the sites on its list of filming locations are in Shanxi: 27 of 36.
This route visits seven of them, from the cliff-hung temple near Datong to a tower in Yongji. Each is tied to the game by Wikipedia or a published location guide, but the game does not say which scene copies which site.
The Kojiki, Japan's oldest surviving book, sets its myths in real places: Izumo, which yielded the land, the cave at Takachiho where Amaterasu hid, Kirishima, one candidate for her grandson's descent, and Ise, said to keep her mirror.
This route follows that story to seven places, from Izumo to Takachiho, Kirishima and Ise. The myth is what the text tells; the shrine foundings and excavations are documented history, and each stop keeps the two apart. Several sites are traditional identifications that rival places also claim.
On 6 August 1945 an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima; three days later, another on Nagasaki. This route follows the two days on the ground, from the bridge that served as the aiming point to the places that survived or were rebuilt.
It starts in Hiroshima at Aioi Bridge, the hypocenter and the Dome, then moves to Nagasaki's hypocenter, cathedral and shrine, and ends with the two museums and parks built in 1955. Death tolls are estimates and are given as the ranges researchers publish.
In July 1853 four black warships anchored off Uraga and ended more than two centuries of Japanese seclusion. Within a year, Commodore Matthew Perry had delivered a president's letter, signed a treaty and opened two ports.
The route follows his two voyages: from the Ryukyu court at Shuri to Uraga, Kurihama, the treaty at Yokohama and the temples of Shimoda. Perry also visited Hakodate in 1854, but that stop is not included.
In April 1701 a lord drew a blade inside Edo Castle, and two years later forty-seven of his leaderless samurai stormed the mansion of the man he had attacked. The documented story runs from a corridor in Edo, through a surrendered castle and a quiet retreat near Kyoto, to a night raid and a temple cemetery in Tokyo.
The route sticks to dated events and places. The legend of Chūshingura, the later play, is kept to the final stop, where it is set apart from what happened.
Two Godzillas, sixty years apart, wreck the same city. In 1954 he comes out of Tokyo Bay at Shinagawa and walks into Ginza; in Shin Godzilla (2016) he lands at Kamata, mutates at Kitashinagawa and is finally frozen beside Tokyo Station.
The route follows the 1954 film first, then Shin Godzilla, using the places named in each story. Where a scene was shot elsewhere, the stop says so.
In Jujutsu Kaisen, 31 October 2018 turns Shibuya Station into a sealed trap, and the fighting that follows is the best-known arc of the series. The places in the story are real ones, from the station's lowest platform to Aoyama Cemetery.
This route follows the Shibuya Incident through the real district: the cemetery, Hikarie, the station, Meiji-jingumae, Mark City and the Scramble Crossing. Several scenes are only tied to a building or an area, so those stops are approximate.
The anime Hyouka is set in a fictional town, but its backdrops are real streets in Takayama, in the mountains of Gifu. The author's home town became the model, and the local tourism board publishes an official pilgrimage model course.
This route follows six places from the opening title to the final episode: the river and morning market, the school-route crossing, the Old Town, the library, the hill shrine and the festival shrine outside town. Where the story renames a place, the pin marks the real one.
Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera's Mexico City: the Casa Azul in Coyoacán, where she was born, his murals in the National Palace and their studios in San Ángel. The two painters married in 1929 and made art in the city for decades.
The route runs from Frida's Blue House through Rivera's murals, the twin studio houses in San Ángel and the Trotsky house nearby, to the museum pyramid Diego built for his collection.
