The Bells of Old Tokyo: Travels in Japanese Time

Bells Of Tokyo takes us through Japanese history and bylanes of Tokyo via the bells. The pace is lovely and a lot of work has gone into the book, which also tells us about the journey of the Japanese capital from Edo to Tokyo. For those interested in Japanese history, culture or travel or all, this is a good read.

Well observed but the attention to detail gets a bit tedious

This is one of the most intriguing books I have ever read and one of the most informative. It contains a great deal of Japanese history (rather less about bells, despite its subtitle). It is also a brilliant depiction of the many and varied districts of Tokyo, the largest city in the world (current population over 37 million – New York City, around 8 million). The one thing that stands out above all others is that Japan is a really exotic place, not only in its landscapes and architecture, but in the thought processes of its people and its endless sets of rituals and rules.Finally, this book is beautifully written. Two things it took me a while to get used to: sentences without a verb, kind of like some haiku, and the Japanese convention of using family name first, so the conductor we know as Seiji Ozawa becomes Ozawa Seiji. (One criticism: there are kanji which are not translated or even transliterated. I have sent a copy of the book to my son, who has lived in Japan and can translate these for me. I think the author should have done so.)As should be obvious from my review, I highly recommend this book.

A ballad through time and space between Edo and Tokyo, an intimate diary of a love story with a city, a culture , its past and future.

I learned a lot and enjoyed beginning to understand more about the history of the country. The author is extremely knowledgable and thoughtful and makes it easy to think about very complicated things.

very interesting book with insightful insights about old Tokyo and the Japanese concept of time

The author sets out to find Tokyo's old timekeeping bells but uncovers layers of the city's history from the Shogun era to the 2011 earthquake. She has a talent for teasing personal stories from the people she encounters so that we see how historical events have shaped the city's residents as well as its landscape. While many travelogues emphasise how alien Japan is to the Western visitor, Sherman is intent on truly getting under the city's constantly shifting surface to find the roots of its unique culture. I love her writing style, lyrical but precise, effortlessly weaving between the city's glittering modernist present and the past that underpins it, between the hectic streets and the almost temple-like contemplative space of Daibo's coffee shop.