From quiet stories of domestic life to accounts of horrific crime, these books introduce the reader to a vast, almost unknowable city

Tokyo: an elusive fictional character in its own right, the subject or stage of many a novel, anime, film or song. It’s a vast city, almost impossible to know entirely. When I lived there, I worked for a Japanese company as a “salaryman” and would commute to my job for two hours every day on the busiest train lines in the city. I began to see familiar faces on my route, and like Sherlock Holmes I’d sneak peeks at people and look for clues to indicate each person’s life story. With that many people running like clockwork to schedule around me, everything felt so interconnected. I wondered how I might recreate this feeling of interconnectivity in a literary form.

My debut novel The Cat and the City follows the adventures of a stray cat in Tokyo who brushes up against a wide variety of characters. They at first feel unrelated but as the narrative progresses we start to see how their lives are all intertwined. The final chapter takes place on what would have been the day of the 2020 Olympic Games opening ceremony.

Related: Top 10 books about Japan

The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley is published by Atlantic Books (£14.99). To order a copy, go to guardianbookshop.com.