This book races through Tokyo's history at a fair clip, tracing its evolution from fishing village to the military capital of Edo and on to the shape-shifting metropolis of the present. The author finds more voices to help him tell his tale. These range from Ichiyo Higuchi to a young Rudyard Kipling. Literary titans like Ryunosuke Akutagawa, Junichiro Tanizaki, Kafu Nagai and Yukio Mishima also pop up.