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This study explores the literary nature of Tokyo which can be drawn from the images of the modern city that are conveyed in Sumidagawa by Nagai Kafû (1909) and in Shitamachi by Hayashi Fumiko (1949). It is conducted through a thematic analysis of the original language used in both works (Japanese) and a comparison of the effects.

Common characteristics are discernible in both works. Firstly, Tokyo is located in shitamachi, the Eastern commoner’s part of the city. In both stories, the engagement of the characters with the landscape is strong and essential to the authors’ fabric of Tokyo as a textual space: emotions and senses are interwoven with the urban topography. Lastly, the depictions of the city are –albeit in different ways – connected to the authors’ own memories and experiences with it. Yet, surely, urban space is being constantly redesigned and re-interpretated (Rohleder and Kindermann, 2020) and Tokyo images contrast deeply in those two novels.

However, this study’s hypothesis is that “something” remains in textual Tokyo beyond historical transformations and inherent differences in the author's sensibilities, and that it is connected to the senses. Its aim is to investigate how Tokyo landscapes depicted in those two works - beyond the contrasting “private topographies” (Follaco, 2017) they are related to -share sensory characteristics that appeal to all senses simultaneously (sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch, kinesthetic) and how this allows a synesthetic perception of Tokyo, conferring a shared poetic feature to its expression in both works.