Description
| Product ID: | 9781529000450 |
| Product Form: | Hardback |
| Country of Manufacture: | GB |
| Title: | The Bells of Old Tokyo |
| Subtitle: | Travels in Japanese Time |
| Authors: | Author: Anna Sherman |
| Page Count: | 352 |
| Subjects: | Memoirs, Memoirs, Travel writing, Places and peoples: general and pictorial works, Travel writing, Places & peoples: general & pictorial works |
| Description: | Select Guide Rating 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. <p><b>As read on BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'</b><br><b>Shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year Award<br>Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize</b><br><br><b>'Sherman’s is a special book. Every sentence, every thought she has, every question she asks, every detail she notices, offers something. </b><i><b>The Bells of Old Tokyo</b></i><b> is a gift . . . It is a masterpiece.' - <i>The </i></b><i><b>Spectator</b></i><br><br>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.<br><br>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, <i>The Bells of Old Tokyo</i> 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’).<br><br>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.</p> |
| Imprint Name: | Picador |
| Publisher Name: | Pan Macmillan |
| Country of Publication: | GB |
| Publishing Date: | 2019-05-16 |
