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Your guide to London's culture and transport news and events taking place across the city.

The Bells of Old Tokyo: Travels in Japanese Time

This event has finished Took place on: Wednesday, 12th Jun 2019

 £4

Join us at Stanfords as 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 culture of a country that can seem startlingly strange to an outsider.

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 and her friendship with the owner of a small, exquisite cafe, who elevates the making and drinking of coffee to an art-form, The Bells of Old Tokyo 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’). 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.

Tickets £4 (redeemable against the price of The Bells of Old Tokyo by Anna Sherman).
 
Includes a glass of wine/soft drink.
 
About the author:
Anna Sherman was born in Little Rock, Arkansas. She studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and Oxford before moving to Tokyo in 2001. The Bells of Old Tokyo is her first book.


Contact and Booking Details

This event has finished Took place on: Wednesday, 12th Jun 2019

 £4

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Disclaimer: All information given is correct at the time of compiling the listings. Any questions about the event should be directed to the event organiser. Photos and images used in this listing are supplied by the organiser.

2019-06-12 2019-06-12 Europe/London The Bells of Old Tokyo: Travels in Japanese Time As a foreigner living in Tokyo, Sherman’s account takes pleasure and fascination in the history and culture of a country that can seem startlingly strange to an outsider. https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/calendar/2019/06/12/the-bells-of-old-tokyo-travels-in-japanese-time-202322 Stanfords,7 Mercer Walk,,London

Location

Stanfords,

7 Mercer Walk,
London,
WC2H 9FA

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