Time takes its toll

In Edo (now Tokyo), before the Meiji restoration, bells marked the beginning of each hour. The hours were named after the animals of the Chinese zodiac; the cow had its own hour, as did the mouse, the chicken, the horse, etc. In winter, daytime hours were shorter than in summer, and night hours were long. The bells told people when to rise, eat and sleep. In 1872, however, Japan switched to Western time, the use of the bells was forbidden and ‘time was torn away from nature’.

Anna Sherman looks for evidence of the time bells of Edo in modern Tokyo. She describes a map that shows the sound-ranges of the bells as circles, ‘like raindrops’, that contain areas of the city and travels around and inside these circles. She visits sites where the bells once rung: a former prison and execution ground, temples and museums. In the spaces that once would have filled with their chimes, she meets and listens to people and their stories.

‘Where English has a single word for “time”, Japanese has a myriad,’ Sherman writes. Ko, from Sanskrit, describes ‘vast’ time; the setsuna, a minute measurement of time; ta-imu, taken from the English word, is ‘used for stop-watches and races’. Pico Iyer, in his book set in the months following his father-in-law’s death, talks of time in a singular sense — time that is passing. He dedicates his book to jikan, the term used most commonly in sentences containing the words ‘what is the time?’ and ‘the time has come’.

Iyer’s time is determined and inescapable, something he perhaps feels more strongly as he grows old. In The Bells of Old Tokyo, time is fluid. It is history and stories; it is the past, still present in a city that is constantly ‘destroying itself’ and rebuilding.