The Bells of Old Tokyo

'Sherman's is a special book. Every sentence, every thought she has, every question she asks, every detail she notices, offers something. The Bells of Old Tokyo is a gift . . . It is a masterpiece.' Spectator/b>For over 300 years, Japan closed itself to outsiders, developing a remarkable and unique culture. During its period of isolation, the inhabitants of the city of Edo, later known as Tokyo, relied on its public bells to tell the time. In her remarkable book, Anna Sherman tells of her search for the bells of Edo, exploring the city of Tokyo and its inhabitants and the individual and particular relationship of Japanese culture - and the Japanese language - to time, tradition, memory, impermanence and history.Through Sherman's journeys around the city and her friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, The Bells of Old Tokyo presents a series of hauntingly memorable voices in the labyrinth that is the metropolis of the Japanese capital: An aristocrat plays in the sea of ashes left by the Allied firebombing of 1945. A scientist builds the most accurate clock in the world, a clock that will not lose a second in five billion years. A sculptor eats his father's ashes while the head of the house of Tokugawa reflects on the destruction of his grandfather's city ('A lost thing is lost. To chase it leads to darkness').The result is a book that not only engages with the striking otherness of Japanese culture like no other, but that also marks the arrival of a dazzling new writer as she presents an absorbing and alluring meditation on life through an exploration of a great city and its people.

An enchanting read, drawing you into Sherman's Tokyo world in a way that makes you wonder why you shouldn't fly there right this minute, with her book as the only guide you'll ever need.

Préface
A hauntingly original book about Tokyo and the Japanese relationship to time, memory and history, seen through the eyes of an outsider, searching for the past that underlies the city's arrestingly visible present.

Auteur
Anna Sherman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and Oxford before moving to Tokyo in 2001. The Bells of Old Tokyo is her first book.

Texte du rabat

In The Bells of Old Tokyo, Anna Sherman explores Japan and revels in all its wonderful particularity. As a foreigner living in Tokyo, Sherman's account takes pleasure and fascination in the history and society of a country that can seem startlingly strange to an outsider.

From her search for the old bells of the city the bells by which its inhabitants kept time during the era when Japan was closed to the West to her friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, here is Tokyo in its variety: from the love hotels of Shinjuku to the appalling fire-storms of 1945 (in which many more thousands of people died than in Hiroshima or Nagasaki), from the death of Mishima Yukio to the impact of the Tohoku earthquake of 2011.

Both a literary history and cultural appreciation, The Bells of Old Tokyo is a beautiful and original book which explores Tokyo and its relationship to time, memory, tradition and history.

'The Bells of Old Tokyo is part personal memoir, part cultural history, but wholly unique. The fragile, fragmentary poetry of its prose so beautifully captures the transience of Tokyo time, the constant cycle of destruction and reconstruction, and the nostalgia for that which has been lost and yet wonder at all that remains to be found.' David Peace

'Anna Sherman ventures deep into the land and its silences . . . This is the rare book that looks past the zany and clashing surfaces of Japan to excavate its heart, and everything we'll never be able to explain about the place, even as we bow before it.' Pico Iyer