Tokyo On Foot Travels in the City's Most Colorful Neighborhoods

This prize-winning book is both an illustrated tour of a Tokyo rarely seen in Japan travel guides and an artist's warm, funny, visually rich, and always entertaining graphic memoir.

Additional Reviews:

"A chef-d'ouevre of graphic art." — Cafes Geographiques blog

"For anyone who has enjoyed a trip to Japan or is just planning a trip for 'someday,' this book is a wonderful peek into different neighborhoods and details of daily life in Japan." — Toko Dots blog

"The book is a very entertaining labour of love, an endearing insight into every day tokyoite life." — Little Aesthete blog

"This book is an illustrated tour of Tokyo and it won the Ptolemy Prize at the 2009 International Festival of Geography. This whole book is filled with fun illustration and no text! It's was SO entertaining for me to flip through pages and enjoy the sights of Tokyo." — Just One Cookbook blog

"When this book arrived my daughters studied the most minute details of every single page from cover to cover, unable to put it down for hours. Over the course of a month I would flip through the book revisiting scenes I'd viewed before always finding something I overlooked on the last viewing, the details are truly amazing." — Tokyo By Bike blog

"Florent Chavouet constantly surprises the readers with beautiful hand drawings of streets and buildings coupled with hilarious comments on the looks and styles of the people around him." — Japan Travel blog

"Besides the awesomeness of the maps, most of the book is full of odd findings and experiences that the author found himself in. I find the book to be pure genius and I am very happy that I picked it up without a second thought. It's all the little additions in the book that make it most worthwhile and I think it makes a great addition to any collection of books." — Yonasu.com

"This is a wonderful gem of a book. It's a quirky, graphic 'guidebook' filled with beautifully rendered and detailed doodlings that capture vignettes of the city seen through the eyes of a resident, rather than a tourist." — SimplyFabulicious.com blog

"…hand-drawn maps…provide information about the various neighborhoods in the city — hence; it can prove to be very helpful for your trip planning." — I Am Aileen blog

"Not only are his drawings aces, I absolutely love his little comments about places and people and things. Part of the reason that I really enjoyed this book was because it made me nostalgic for my own first days in Tokyo. I remembered thinking a lot of the same things." — Jamieism blog

This prize-winning book is both an illustrated tour of a Tokyo rarely seen in Japan travel guides and an artist's warm, funny, visually rich, and always entertaining graphic memoir.

Florent Chavouet, a young graphic artist, spent six months exploring Tokyo while his girlfriend interned at a company there. Each day he would set forth with a pouch full of color pencils and a sketchpad, and visit different neighborhoods. This stunning book records the city that he got to know during his adventures. It isn't the Tokyo of packaged tours and glossy guidebooks, but a grittier, vibrant place, full of ordinary people going about their daily lives and the scenes and activities that unfold on the streets of a bustling metropolis.

Here you find businessmen and businesswomen, hipsters, students, grandmothers, shopkeepers, police officers, and other urban types and tribes in all manner of dress and hairstyles. A temple nestles among skyscrapers; the corner grocery anchors a diverse assortment of dwellings, cafes, and shops—often tangled in electric lines.

The artist mixes styles and tags his pictures with wry comments and observations. Realistically rendered advertisements or posters of pop stars contrast with cartoon sketches of iconic objects or droll vignettes, like a housewife walking her pet pig, a Godzilla statue in a local park, and an urban fishing pond that charges 400 yen per half hour.

This very personal guide to Tokyo is organized by neighborhood with hand-drawn maps that provide an overview of each neighborhood, but what defines them is what caught the artist's eye and attracted his formidable drawing talent. Florent Chavouet begins his introduction by observing that, "Tokyo is said to be the most beautiful of ugly cities." With wit, a playful sense of humor, and the multicolor pencils of his kit, he sets aside the question of urban ugliness or beauty and captures the Japanese essence of a great city in this genuinely vital portrait.