Following Detective Conan down a Tottori sidewalk, from Yura station to his creator's door

The train that stops at Yura is two carriages long, and for most of the day it comes about once an hour. You step down onto a short platform, and before the doors have shut behind you the station has already told you why you came. The white sign reads Yura (由良), the name it has carried since the San'in Main Line was laid. Bolted beside it, in the round, friendly lettering of a comic, is a second name: Conan Station. A bronze boy in a bow tie stands near the ticket gate with one finger raised, as if he has just worked something out that the rest of us have not.

A two-carriage arrival

Yura is a stop in Hokuei (北栄町), a farming town on the Sea of Japan side of Tottori, the least populous of Japan's prefectures. Almost nobody would step off here were it not for a single fact: this is where Gosho Aoyama (青山剛昌) grew up, the artist who has drawn Meitantei Conan (名探偵コナン) — Detective Conan — since 1994, a case a week for three decades and counting. The town noticed what it had, and the nickname Conan Station has hung above the platform for over a decade now.

The station itself is small and unstaffed for much of the day, the kind of country stop where a single vending machine hums beside the waiting room and the timetable is a laminated sheet you read twice to be sure. What makes it worth the trip is not the building but the direction it points you: out the north exit, past the bronze boy, onto a road that has been quietly rearranged around one long-running story.

The kilometre of bronze

From the station the route is called Conan Ōdōri (コナン通り), Conan Avenue, and it runs roughly 1.4 kilometres to the museum at its far end. You do not need a map; the road maps itself. Bronze figures stand at intervals along the pavement and the low walls — the boy detective, the sleeping older man he props up, the girl in the school uniform, the gadgets rendered in metal. There are around a hundred of them by the time you reach the end, and locals have long since stopped looking; a woman wheels her shopping past a life-size sculpture without a glance.

Halfway along, the road lifts over the Yura River on Conan Bridge (コナン大橋), its railings set with bronze reliefs of the cast so that the walk across becomes a slow reading of faces. There is a red pillar postbox topped with a small figure, and it works — drop a card in and it leaves with an ordinary postmark, no ceremony. What the road does well is refuse spectacle. Nobody is selling you a ticket to look. The frame from the page is simply laid along a working street, and you walk it at the pace of the town.

由良の駅を出ると、歩道にはコナンの銅像が点々と続いている。

The house where the drawings live

At the end of the avenue is the Aoyama Gōshō Furusato-kan (青山剛昌ふるさと館), the artist's hometown museum, opened in 2007 on the edge of the old Daiei district. Admission runs about 700 yen for an adult, a few hundred for a child, and it opens from mid-morning to around half past five, with the last entry a little before closing. It is a modest single building, not a franchise park, and it is the better for it.

Inside are things a fan wants to stand in front of and a stranger can still enjoy: original inked pages under glass, the desk-and-lamp reconstruction of where the work is done, and full-scale props built from the story's inventions — the bow tie that alters a voice, the skateboard with an engine, the wristwatch that fires a tranquiliser dart. Children work the interactive puzzles; adults read the timeline of how a rural boy who liked drawing became a name known across East Asia. You can see the whole thing in an hour, longer if you read every caption, and it sends you back down the avenue understanding the bronze figures a little better.

Watermelon country, off the frame

Step out of the story for a moment and Hokuei is a produce town first. This corner of Tottori is known for watermelon in high summer and, in autumn, for nijisseiki nashi (二十世紀梨), the pale, crisp, twentieth-century pear the prefecture built its farming name on. Roadside stands and the local farm shop sell them by the box, and the fields you pass on the walk from the station are the same ones that fill those boxes. If you come between late August and October, the pear is the reason to linger past the museum.

The coast is close, too. Hokuei sits on the San'in shore, where low dunes and grey-blue water run west toward the bigger sand hills near Tottori city, and the wind off the sea keeps the town cooler than the inland basins. None of this is on any storyboard. It is the ordinary geography the story happens to be pinned to — a place that grows fruit and faces the sea, and that a comic has, gently, given a second name.

Getting there, and the train you must not miss

Yura is not hard to reach, only easy to strand yourself at. From the Kansai side, the Super Hakuto (スーパーはくと) limited express runs from Kyoto and Osaka toward Tottori and Kurayoshi (倉吉); change at Kurayoshi to a westbound local on the San'in Main Line and Yura is a couple of stops, roughly ten minutes, on. From Tottori city you take the same line eastward. The limited-express leg is the cost that matters — several thousand yen from Osaka — while the museum at the far end is the smaller 700-yen expense.

The one mistake to avoid is treating the local timetable like a city's. San'in trains through Yura run about hourly and thin out in the evening, so the moment you arrive, photograph the return departures on the waiting-room wall and plan the visit backward from the train you intend to catch. The avenue is a flat, unhurried walk of twenty-odd minutes each way; do it slowly, drink water in summer, and remember that the statues stand on a lived-in street, not a stage. Come on a weekday if you can, when the road is yours and the only other sound is a farm truck changing gear on the bridge.