She devotes the same sort of attention required by chado to her description of Yukako and their life in Kyoto - its tatami-floored teahouses and the tea implements, including the several hundred-years-old bowl that is broken and soldered with gold the flavor of citron syrup poured over shaved ice the 'meowl, the twang, the start-and-stop of Japanese music' and, perhaps, most important to Urako's empowerment, the sounds and multiple meanings of Japanese words. She sleeps holding Yukako on their neighboring futons and wooden pillows (even after Yukako marries). Urako spends years of her life attending to, and then falling in love with the shrewd and elegant Yukako. She is discovered by the young daughter of the family, Shin Yukako, who takes in this 'little cat,' dubs her Urako, and facilitates her adoption into the family as her little sister/servant. She escapes in one of the fires that bookends the story, and slips into a tea house that belongs to the Shins, at family of master teachers of chado, or The Way of Tea. At nine, Aurelia leaves her dying mother in New York City and travels to Japan with her pedophilic uncle, a missionary on assignment to Christianize Japan. Prior to Sen's involvement, women had rarely been part of the service, or were outright forbidden to participate.Īlthough The Tea House Fire was very loosely based on Sen, it is a bildungsroman told from the perspective of the fictional character Aurelia Bernard. Yukako changed the fate of the tea ceremony in the late 1800s by bringing it into the curriculum of the newly established girls' school. It's an intricately imagined world of shifting politics and power, changing class and gender roles, with a lush backdrop of shoji-screened tea houses, geishas draped in 12-layered kimonos, and lacquered palanquins bearing members of the emperor's family.Īvery was inspired to write the novel after researching the true story of a woman named Sen Yukako. This artful debut novel from Ellis Avery, a Columbia University creative writing teacher who studied Japanese tea ceremony for five years, tells the epic story of a 19th-century Japan in flux, just as it's opening to the West.

One of the most baffling things about The Tea House Fire is why it hasn't gotten more press.

Review | The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

The teahouse fire by ellis avery