Zōshigaya Cemetery

Zoshigaya Cemetery in Minami-Ikebukuro was opened as a municipal cemetery in 1874 and has since become resting place of a remarkably dense literary pantheon. Its roughly 106,000 square metres hold the graves of, among others, the novelist Natsume Soseki, the poet Kunikida Doppo and the Irish-Greek-Japanese writer Lafcadio Hearn, who shaped the image of Japan in the West. Traces of the Meiji era show in the plain stone stelae with their long family inscriptions and in the Western-influenced tombs of early modern academics. Japanese visitors come specifically to Soseki's grave, while Western travellers usually walk these quiet residential lanes in the footsteps of Hearn.