A Passport of Pages
“Kosha Odu, Desha Suttu”, goes the old Kannada proverb: read to understand, travel to feel. In this reflective journey through novels and nations, A Passport of Pages shows how imagination can guide our footsteps more than any map.
The Bridge of Fiction
As I stand at Nihonbashi Bridge on a quiet summer afternoon, my mind begins to wander. There’s no buzz of tourists like in Shibuya, no cafes designed to capture the perfect Instagram moment with a thousand people crossing the road. Here, there is stillness — and history.
Above me, a flyover slices through the sky, a concrete symbol of a country racing toward modernity. It casts its shadow over the bridge, hiding Tokyo’s kilometer zero beneath it — a starting point long forgotten. The flyover carries photo-chasing influencers to all corners of the city, yet few stop here, where the city truly begins.
But I stop. Because I’ve been here before — not in body, but in the pages of a novel.
There’s the Kirin — the mythical beast statue, half-dragon, half-deer. That’s where the body was found.
Not in real life, of course — in A Death in Tokyo by Keigo Higashino. The opening scene places a dying man at the foot of this statue. It was Higashino’s Tokyo that first brought me here — not a guidebook, not a viral video, but a story.
It isn’t glamorous. Most of the places I visited that day don’t trend on Instagram. But they live in my mind and heart — and in the minds of everyone who’s wandered through the alleys and parks of Higashino’s fiction. That’s the quiet power of a well-told story: it makes places unforgettable not because they’re photographed, but because they’re felt.
The ROI of Imagination
“I read five books a week,” screamed the YouTube thumbnail.
“How to get maximum ROI from your reading,” promised another.
I searched for ways to improve my reading habit — to reconnect with the joy I once felt turning pages late into the night. But all I found was a world obsessed with optimization: squeezing lessons, frameworks, and hacks out of every page. Reading, it seemed, was only worthwhile if it made you richer, faster, more efficient.
There was no space for wonder. No mention of getting lost in another world or feeling something that wasn’t strategic. Just cold utility.
Some even said it outright: “Don’t waste time on fiction.”
Worse still — “It’s for women.”
As if letting yourself feel, imagine, or dream were somehow less masculine. As if empathy were an inefficient emotion for a man to carry.
I was told to highlight, to summarize, to turn stories into action items. But all I wanted was to sit with a character. To feel their losses. To learn nothing useful — and still walk away changed.
A Passport of Pages
I still remember the day I first read Hudukata, sometime in 2001 — back when there was no Wikipedia, no easy way to fact-check or look up maps. As the first book in the Millennium series, it cracked open my world. Machu Picchu, the lost cities of the Andes, the Sahara, the Alps — all spilled out of its pages like magic.
In the days that followed, I devoured all sixteen books in the series. I jumped from the deserts of Africa to the peaks of Europe, from sympathizing with the struggles of Fijian communities to feeling the horrors of World War II. Those stories didn’t just entertain me — they expanded my aspirations. They told me the world was vast, complicated, human. And it was mine to explore.
It took years, but I slowly began visiting the places I’d first met in fiction. Each time, standing there in the real world, I felt something greater than any bucket-list satisfaction. These weren’t just tourist sites. They were story settings. Living memories. They meant something.
Books and travel — they’re the same, really.
Books show us how people feel in a place; travel shows us the place that gave rise to those feelings. Together, they create a connection that’s hard to forget.
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