Filming locations in Tokyo

Tokyo plays itself in Lost in Translation, but the version Sofia Coppola filmed in 2003 is a city seen through a haze of jet lag and quiet wonder, and that mood still hangs over its locations today. The film's emotional home is the Park Hyatt Tokyo, high above west Shinjuku, where Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson trade insomnia and whisky in the hushed New York Bar on the top floor.

That bar is the single most rewarding stop. It is a working hotel, but the bar welcomes non-guests in the evening for a drink, with a cover charge and a dress code, so you can ride up for the same wall of glass, the same skyline, the same melancholy hush the lovers shared. Time it for dusk and watch the city switch on below you.

The film's other indelible image is street-level: Shibuya Crossing, the vast scramble where pedestrians flood in every direction under towering screens. It is free and entirely public, you simply walk it, but for the famous overhead shot, climb to the Shibuya Sky deck or claim a café window above the junction. After dark, with the screens blazing, it is at its most cinematic.

The two scenes sit a quick train ride apart in the city's western wards, and Tokyo's superb rail network makes the hop effortless. A sensible base is Shinjuku or Shibuya itself, which puts both the hotel bar and the crossing within easy reach and drops you into the neon districts the film lingers on.

What the movie really captures is the texture of being adrift in an enormous, courteous, slightly unknowable city, and that is still the best way to enjoy Tokyo. Let yourself wander between the wards, lose an afternoon in a department-store basement or a backstreet of tiny bars, and the film's spell quietly reassembles itself around you.