Review | In The Bells of Old Tokyo, writer examines the Japanese concept of time
- As much a national history as it is a travelogue, Anna Sherman’s book paints an intricate, rich portrait of the city once known as Edo
The Bells of Old Tokyo: Travels in Japanese Time
by Anna Sherman
Picador
5/5 stars
In her haunting, beautiful debut travel narrative, Anna Sherman takes the reader along on her quest to find the bells of old Tokyo, illuminating a lost world hidden in plain sight. These bells tolled the hours in this city long before it became known as Tokyo, and long before Japan was opened up to the West. Sherman, a United States-born, Oxford University-educated classicist, moved to Japan in 2001, and was transfixed from the moment she heard the bell of Zojoji temple, an ancient structure near Tokyo Tower.
“I followed the sound,” Sherman writes, before describing her arrival at Zojoji’s triple gate, where she sees the huge bell and the young monk ringing it. Having waited for the bell-ringer to disappear up a long flight of stairs, she approaches the small metal plaque on the bell’s stone tower. Its inscription reads: “Shiba kiridoshi. One of Edo’s Bells of Time.”
Before the city was Tokyo it was called Edo. And from the early 17th century to 1868, Edo was the de facto political centre of Japan, with the ruling Tokugawa shogunate licensing more time-telling bells as the city grew.
Essential to her quest is a map placed beside the plaque showing the sound range of each bell as “a series of circles overlapping each other like raindrops on a still pool”.