Stephen Mansfield is an author and photojournalist who has been living on the edges of Tokyo since the late 1980s. His book, Tokyo: A Cultural History , looks at how Tokyo grew from a fishing village along a marshy estuary to one of the world’s largest and most culturally vibrant metropolises. We learn that for all its modernity and craving for the new, it is a city impregnated with the past. In the excerpt below Mansfield looks at piece of Tokyo’s history that has lived on in literature.