The purpose of this study is to widen the scope of world literature and literature focusing on the environment by creating asymmetry shifting from an East/West comparative paradigm towards an East/East conversation between Japanese author Ishimure Michiko’s 'Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow' and author Abdel Rahman Munif’s 'Cities of Salt'. The authors, from vastly different cultures and parts of the world, write about the human interaction with the environment focusing on place in the wake of man-made environmental crises. They look at the relationship of the human and the more-than-human within the environment through the oculus of place. Viewing place as a central entity in combination with deliberate choices of narrative voice and structure creates a sense of longing, loss, and nostalgia after the shock of loss of identity and environmental change. These changes resulted from the rapid encroachment of industrialization into traditional spaces whose identities were largely formed by the environment and the space it has created for the people living within it. The importance and influence of place, in these cases, the desert and the sea, is so pivotal that it can be argued the central figures in these works are not the people, but the places whose voices are clearly heard under the roar of the modern industrial machine. Using the shamanistic narrator and the ecological Bedouin, Ishimure and Munif channel the voices of the sea and the desert. This allows the readers to experience their stories alongside the people who have lived, lost, and found their identities in these places thereby reflecting on the readers’ own relationships with the environment around them, and places that have informed their own culture, identity, and existence. The fact that both authors, from such vastly different parts of the world, write of similar themes in a universally understood perspective shows the importance and impact of such works, especially when read within the current landscape of growing environmental awareness.