Murasaki Shikibu's eleventh-century novel follows Prince Genji from the capital to exile on the Suma shore and, in its last ten chapters, to Uji. Many of its places are real shrines and temples that visitors can still enter.
The route runs by chapter, from Kitayama to Uji, then to the temples tied to the author. Chapters are fiction; the Ishiyama-dera writing story is tradition, and Rozan-ji is one scholar's identification.
Lázaro, a hungry boy born in a river mill, serves a string of cruel masters on the roads of Spain. The picaresque classic is told in his own sly voice, and it lets a reader trace his path from the bridge in Salamanca to the streets of Toledo.
This route follows his early years: the stone bull, the grapes at Almorox, the revenge at Escalona, the miser priest at Maqueda and the squire's empty house in Toledo. Most places are named only as towns, so most pins are approximate.
Grigory Pechorin, bored and brilliant, drifts through the Caucasus leaving damage behind him: a smuggler's hut at Taman, the spa season at Pyatigorsk and Kislovodsk, and a duel on a cliff ledge. Lermontov wrote five linked tales and was himself killed in a duel at Pyatigorsk in 1841.
The route follows the book's order, from a snowy pass and a seaport to the spring, the harp pavilion and the rock gate where Pechorin plays his games, ending on Mashuk where the author met his own fate. Some pins mark real places that only stand in for the novel's.
On an exceptionally hot July evening a student leaves a garret "more like a cupboard than a room" and counts exactly 730 steps to a pawnbroker's door. Dostoevsky's novel plays out in the Hay Market slums, on the canal and on the bridges of the Neva, and he hid many addresses behind initials such as "S. Place" and "K. bridge".
This route follows Raskolnikov and Svidrigailov from the garret to the police office. The garret, the pawnbroker's house and the police office are researchers' identifications rather than facts, and are marked as such.
Victor Hugo's 1862 novel follows the convict Jean Valjean from the night a bishop's kindness turns him towards good, through years as a respected factory owner and the rescuer of a child, to the street fighting of June 1832. This route follows that path from a bishop's town in the south to the sewers and bridges of Paris.
Hugo hid two of the towns behind initials and the wine-shop barricade has been built over, so only the Luxembourg Garden is pinned exactly; the other stops mark real places standing in for the book's.
In spring 1689 the poet Matsuo Bashō gave up his hut in Edo and set off on foot with his friend and disciple Kawai Sora into Oku, the remote north of Japan. For about 156 days and some 2,400 kilometres they walked to the places the old poets had made famous — a barrier gate, a bay of pine islands, a battlefield, a mountain temple — and Bashō answered them with haiku.
The travel diary he made of it, Oku no Hosomichi, published in 1702, is one of the classics of Japanese literature, and its stops are still pilgrimage sites. Bashō polished the facts for art; Sora's own diary shows where. Dates follow the old lunar calendar, so they are given here by season.
