With chapters named mostly after Tokyo’s districts and neighbourhoods, her narrative reveals its secrets at inter­vals and in discrete fragments, so that the past and the present overlap and radiate outward like the sound map of the bells. It’s only at the end of the book that this pattern becomes visible.

Even then, parts of the book remain mysteri­ous and unknowable, like Japan itself, where the national language has no single word for time. As contemporary Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima reminds Sherman when he meets her in Hibiya district towards the end of her journey – fittingly, the same area where she begins her quest – “In the West time is a line. In Asia it’s a circle.”

Early on in her journey, an American translator who writes books in Japanese tells Sherman: “Remember that Japanese time is told in animals, in the zodiac. People still feel connected to the zodiac here. The year you were born defines who you are.” Later, Sherman points out that when shoguns ruled Japan, each hour was named after one of the Chinese zodiac animals, and a day had 12 hours. In Edo, the hours changed with the seasons, so that a winter hour was much shorter than a summer hour. But when Emperor Meiji ushered in timekeeping and the Western calendar in 1872, “No longer did clocks adapt to the seasons, the weather and the tides,” she writes. “Time was torn away from nature.”

Even the exquisitely crafted old mechanical clocks she encounters in the Daimyo Clock Museum – “an island of old clocks” – measured time differently: the hours were counted back­wards and clocks went up only to nine.

To comprehend Japanese conceptions of time, Sherman tracks down a clockmaker who constructs the old way: devices that tell the time by when the light rises and fades, instead of in fixed, unchanging numbers. “I bet my life on the clocks,” this youthful, self-taught craftsman tells her. “Making clocks in the old way is a return to identity; a return to who we are.”

Underpinning Sherman’s search and what the bells might reveal about the past, the present and notions of time is the story of Daibo Coffee and her near-reverence for the man who made it for 38 years. Famous for his coffee and the slow way it’s made – “one drop, two drops, then three, until the water trickled down in a glitter­ing chain” – Katsuji Daibo once said he wanted his customers to fall asleep while they waited.

His small cafe no longer exists, but for years it was a place of refuge for Sherman, an unchanging institution in an ever-changing city. Sherman says Daibo once told her: “You leave them alone and make their coffee right, then slowly, gently, people will return to their true selves.”

This take from modern Japan’s coffee culture, which took root after the second world war and boomed in the 1960s, becomes one of many tantalising threads in this mesmerising narrative. Brimming with observations of the Japanese writers, artists, monks, clockmakers, bell ringers and Western scholars the writer meets along the way, The Bells of Old Tokyo paints an intricate, rich portrait of this labyrinthine city.

In one moment, Sherman will be pondering the origins of the Buddhist deity Benzaiten and the signi­ficance of the Golden Light Sutra whereas in another she’ll explain that some Japanese haven’t forgiven the foreigners who aban­doned the country after the Fukushima nuclear disaster.

Fukushima, earthquakes, fires, conflict. All have exacted an immense toll and left an indelible imprint on Japan, and all are acknowledged in The Bells of Old Tokyo, which is as much a history of Japan as it is a travelogue.

The book is also a meditation on transience, spirit and endurance. In Nihonbashi – the zero point from where all distances across the country were measured during the Edo period and where the First Bell of Time rang out the hours – the earth itself was believed to be contaminated by kegare, the spiritual pollution of blood and crime.

And at Kaneiji temple, in Ueno, the most senior monks hold a requiem service on May 15 every year for the spirits of the shogitai, the samurai who died fighting the Emperor Meiji’s soldiers in the 1868 Battle of Ueno, after which Edo became Tokyo. No outsider may witness this ceremony, where passages from the Lotus Sutra are read aloud, Sherman writes, quoting one of the monks as saying, “We’ll keep saying those prayers for as long as Kaneiji exists.”

Few memories of the dead could be more raw or more painful than those of Mrs Nihei, an 80-year-old guide Sherman meets at the Centre of Tokyo Raids and War Damage, in Kitasuna. This small, little-known memorial was established in 2002 by private citizens to preserve the memory of those who died in the Great Tokyo Air Raid of March 10, 1945. Between midnight and morning, more people died in Tokyo than in either Nagaskai or Hiroshima, writes Sherman, adding: “I was fearful of what I might learn at Kitasuna. I was afraid of what I would see.”

But see and learn she does, giving full voice to Mrs Nihei’s heart-rending memories in one of the most poignant and revelatory moments in the book.

Another who witnessed the devastating effects of the wartime bombings as a child is Lord Tokugawa, 18th in a line that started in the 17th century with the first Tokugawa shogun, Ieyasu. “A lost thing is lost. If you try to chase it, that’s a mistake,” he cautions when she asks if his grand­fathers ever spoke of what was gone. “Being sentimental about the past leads to darkness.”

It’s impossible to disagree with the words on the book’s dust jacket, written by travel writer and Japan resident Pico Iyer: “If a more soulful and original book on Japan has been published in the past few years, I haven’t seen it.”