Updated on Jul 1 2010 for latest versions

export JAVA_HOME=/usr/lib/jvm/current #changeme!
export MYJAVAHOME=$JAVA_HOME

wget http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/tokyocabinet-1.4.45.tar.gz
tar -zxvf tokyocabinet-1.4.45.tar.gz
cd tokyocabinet-1.4.45
./configure --enable-off64 --prefix=/usr
make && sudo make install
cd ..

wget http://1978th.net/tokyocabinet/javapkg/tokyocabinet-java-1.23.tar.gz
tar -zxvf tokyocabinet-java-1.23.tar.gz
cd tokyocabinet-java-1.23
./configure --prefix=/usr
make && sudo make install
cd ..
 

You may need bzip2-devel + ?zlib? (RH/Fedora) or libbz2-dev + zlib1g-dev (Debian/Ubuntu) installed before running configure.

Don’t worry about the second bit if you don’t need the java bindings.