Anna Sherman

Anna Sherman is a writer whose close observation of place anchors The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and a City. The book follows her search for the bells once used to mark the hours in Edo, combining walks through modern Tokyo with encounters involving craftspeople, scholars, religious sites, clocks, memory, and the Japanese language. Picador published the work, which was shortlisted for the Stanford Dolman Travel Book of the Year and longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize. Sherman studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and Oxford, then moved to Tokyo in 2001. That grounding in classical languages and her years in Japan inform a book that moves between personal travel writing and cultural history without becoming a conventional guide.