In early 20th century Tokyo, female secondary school students and middle-class businessmen emerged from social, ideological, and economic changes and commuted from suburbia to inner-city schools and offices by electric train. Railways and trams became places for observing and being observed, and female passengers were often the objects of unwelcome attention. Increased use of urban transport extended the opportunities for men and women to work, study, and interact, but trains were, at times, the site of urban pathology or seduction, symbolic of the modernizing city itself. The historical concurrence and interrelationship of the proliferation of new gender roles in Tokyo, the expansion of transport networks, and the rise of the suburbs in the years after the war with Russia were depicted in the writings of the times. This article discusses Tayama Katai's 'The Girl Fetish' (1909), a story of a commuter's fatal obsession with schoolgirls that depicts and reacts to these historical changes.