Sherman studied Greek and Latin at Wellesley College and Lincoln College, Oxford, before moving to Tokyo in 2001. The Bells of Old Tokyo: Meditations on Time and the City, originally published in 2019, is her first book. “When I first moved to Japan, I worked as a researcher for an architect. For two years I walked the city every day, especially its older neighborhoods, taking notes on Tokyo’s secret spaces, its hidden histories. Although wars, earthquakes, and fires have erased much of Tokyo’s past, much remains: high mud walls and tsuji-bei tiles; a sumo ring almost as old as the city; an empress teahouse and fishing pond with its wild beehives and kingfishers; iron dragons on Japan Bridge.” The oldest and newest often appear together in this city: zodiac animals painted on the 17th-century Ueno pagoda near the park’s exquisite new Treasure Hall—“a box within a box within a box”; Viñoly’s cavernous glass Tokyo International Forum sailing past Yūrakuchō’s early-20th-century brick railway arches. I love the contrasts of Tokyo, the skyscraper next to a three-hundred-year-old pine tree—knowing that the tree can outlast the steel tower.