Sherman, A: Bells of Old Tokyo

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