The Bells of Old Tokyo: Travels in Japanese Time

The Bells of Old Tokyo: Travels in Japanese Time - Anna Sherman

Brand: Pan Macmillan | Status: Còn hàng

440.000₫

"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." - Amazon Customer Reviews

Số lượng:

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, The Bells of Old Tokyo presents a series of hauntingly memorable voices in the labyrinth 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.