On December 9, 1916, Natsume Sōseki died of gastric ulcer at Soseki Sanbo in Waseda-Minami-cho at the age of 49; after the funeral he was buried at Zoshigaya Cemetery. The grave lies in the same wide Zoshigaya cemetery through which Sōseki had already sent the protagonist of Kokoro in the novel's climactic scene, where Sensei visits the grave of his friend K — a place that joins the author to his own work. Disciples and readers continue to visit the grave; for anyone devoted to modern Japanese literature it remains a site of pilgrimage.

Lafcadio Hearn (Koizumi Yakumo) died of angina on September 26, 1904, aged 54, at Nishi-Ōkubo in Ushigome Ward (today's Ōkubo in Shinjuku), and was buried in Zoshigaya Cemetery. At the family's wish a Japanese-style funeral was held; the gravestone is inscribed with his Japanese names Yakumo and Koizumi-ke no Haka. For his role in introducing Japanese culture to the English-speaking world, visitors from Japan and abroad continue to pay their respects, and flowers are never absent from the grave.

John Manjirō (Nakahama Manjirō, 1827–1898) — a fisherman from Nakanohama village in Tosa Province who became the first Japanese of the closed-country era to reach the American mainland, and after his return served as interpreter and teacher to the shogunate and Meiji government, pioneering Western learning and navigational training in modern Japan — was buried in Zoshigaya Cemetery after his death in 1898. As the grave of a man who embodies the history of late-Edo and Meiji international exchange, it is frequently visited by researchers.