Over the last two decades, geographers have revealed how revenant narratives inscribed in the fabric of urban environments work to haunt cities and their inhabitants, emphasising the role of social (Degen and Hetherington 2001), historical (Till 2005), and affective (Pile 2005; Holloway 2010) encounters with the supernatural in city spaces. This shared interest in spectral or ‘spectro-geography’ (Maddern and Adey 2008) provides a geographical response to the broader ‘spectral turn’ within the humanities that began in the late twentieth century (Luckhurst 2002). Existing geographical studies analyse spectrality from a predominantly figurative perspective, while frequently overlooking the significance of the supernatural in the physical production of urban geographies. Taking a literary geographical approach to supernatural Tokyo, this article (per)forms an analytic ‘legend-trip’ of the Japanese metropolis, exposing the ways in which place, narrative, and folklore amalgamate to produce the city as an ‘interspatiality’ (Hones 2022).

Read Revenant narratives/literary hauntings: on the spectral geography of the Japanese metropolis