The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery (2006)

Wonderful, wonderful book. Historical fiction at its best. Aurelia, a young girl from New York, loses her mother and travels to Japan with her uncle. She runs away during a fire and is taken in by a Japanese family who name her Urako. We see Japan from 1866-1891, as they open their country to Western influences. The Shinn family has done tea ceremonies for generations, but even those have to change in changing times. Yukako learns the tea ceremony from behind screens while her father teaches it to young men. When financial times are hard, Yukako teaches the ceremony to other women. The story line is actually not that important, the things that drew me to this book were the descriptions of the richly textured life in Japan - the relationships, the class system, the custom, the dress, the food, the bathing, everything. For example, I had no idea that when kimonos were cleaned, they were first dismantled, then washed, then sown back together. Households actually had seamstresses just for that purpose. Unsurprisingly, the arranged marriages often were not very happy ones, but this book gave me a more in depth sense of those and the relationship between men and women. Since interaction between the sexes was so limited, it created a tight knit female community. The Western influences leads to more options for the women, not only in dress, but in schooling and work.

It was fascinating to watch this Western girl adapt, learn the language, and latch on to this family - so giving us an insider's glimpse into the Japanese world, but with Western understanding. I have to admit, I never did fully understand the importance of the tea ceremony - something you had to train for years to do correctly with subtleties that go way beyond my perceptual abilities. Maybe if I think of it as an ultimate piece of classical performance art. Otherwise it is hard to imagine the level of luxury that has to be obtained to spend that much time and focus on this choreographed social gathering. I'll have to talk to a Japanese expert to understand this more fully. But the book itself made me feel great - I learned about another piece of the world and a specific time period, I enjoyed Urako and many of the characters created by Ellis Avery, and the storyline too was fulfilling in ways I can't describe without giving too much away.

This is Ellis Avery's first novel, and as Emily Barton wrote for the LA Times: "a novel that, like the tea ceremony itself, provides true pleasure to the intellect and all the senses."