The Teahouse Fire by Ellis Avery

When I was nine, in the city now called Kyoto, I changed my fate. I walked into the shrine through the red arch and struck the bell. I bowed twice. I clapped twice. I whispered to the foreign goddess and bowed again. And then I heard the shouts and the fire. What I asked for? Any life but this one.

And thus begins the story of Aurelia Caillard a French-American girl who loses her mother before her time and is ferried to Japan with her abusive Missionary Uncle later managing to escape to a Great Japanese Tea-House where she learns Japanese Tea Ceremony,temae, the meaning of family, loyalty, elegance, love, forgiveness, death, and life.

Social Ranking and Acceptance

“Now,” the older woman said in Japanese, crouching to fix me with her small eyes, “your father?”

“None,” I said, as far as I knew.
The woman blanched a little, and persisted. “Your mother?”
Now I flinched. I didn’t want to say it. “None,” I repeated. The two women glanced at each other. I felt queerly translucent. Saying the thing for the first time made it more real, but saying it in this language abstracted it from me, as if the moment were happening to someone else.

Language forms part of our identity. When Aurelia (later the Japanese name Urako) is found she has to confess to being an orphan, saying it in what little Japanese she knows divorces her old identity from her, makes her feel foreign to who she was. At the same time it establishes how foreign Aurelia is in her new environment of Japan, this is an important point as one of the main themes of the book is that Aurelia is never truly accepted in the culture, even after years learning to think, live, and breathe in Japanese.

The task of running Tea Houses in Pre-Western Japan was granted to families of the highest cast, Samurai, and only the wealthy and powerful could come to enjoy being served tea. Thus throughout the novel there is an element of worth in terms of social status. Take for example Jiro, a man from a lower cast who married Yukako, and became successor of the Tea House, only to fall when he found he didn't have the social graces or caliber of elegance to manage running all the poetic details of Tea House. His wife, the true Samurai, takes over.

Trying to jump social status leaves a kind of inflation that shows your true worth, and leaves you empty, out of your element. The lesson is one should accept who and where they are and grow slowly to manifest their own world into greatness. No matter what role that world plays, it is important.

Poetry, Discipline, and Elegance
...as she followed Yukako’s maxims: “Make heavy things look light; make light things look heavy.”

Yukako put out the fire in the floorboard pit, and I sat with her quietly. When she found me in this room, she was the age I am now, I marveled. The host’s door to the mizuya was open, as was the outside door beyond ---the push-up sky-light, too, the small windows and the little crawl-through door ---so that the bleached-bone gold of the house was lit on all sides by green air and pink petals. The very house seemed to be breathing light. Above the lovely dark board with its whitegrained streak, a calligraphed scroll hung in the alcove, edged in sky-blue silk. Beneath it, in place of flowers, lay a small pair of flower-cutting scissors, their butterfly handles gleaming. “Why?” I asked, pointing. “Why?” Yukako teased. “What flower is most beautiful of all?” It was a matter of catechism, not opinion. “Sakura,” I answered. “Sakura only bloom a few days a year,” she said. “And now they’re everywhere. To cut a branch of cherry blossoms and bring it into the teahouse is too much, don’t you think?” She nodded toward the alcove. “This is just enough, the shears alone.” Walking back through the moss-and-slate garden, the fresh spring air blowing petals my way, I felt joy, joy, at how I saw the outside world more intensely for having seen the world Yukako made inside. No wonder Jiro resented not getting to choose and name the tea bowls himself; every aspect of speaking through tea gave pleasure.

The book echoes again and again the extreme importance of elegance and aesthetic, the idea that learned traditions so enrich life as to be coveted. What it calls into question is what it means to be civilized. What are the movements, rules, and aesthetics, learned and practiced by (most) all of us that make our world a more pleasant place to live? The Tea House takes the idea of culture to the most extreme level. Take for example the situation where Yukako is obliged to hang pictures of the Emperor in every tea room:

“Of course we’ll accept it: it would be rude not to. But how ridiculous. It makes me wonder if he ever understood the Way of Tea at all. A photo for every tearoom? How inelegant!”
She use the same word Sei Shonagon had nine hundred years before, describing a hayseed of her own acquaintance. As Tsuko nodded and soothed, more gracefully than I’d ever been able to, I wondered if the Heian court lady had ever written of being upstaged in the eyes of her Empress by some young modern thing. Perhaps it was on a page Shonagon had brushed and burned, a list of inelegant feelings.


No inelegance can be tolerated, it is important though to distinguish this from perfectionism, since Tea culture actually understands the inability to achieve perfection, indeed designs the concept in to the art:

In the tea world there is a phrase, ichigo ichi. One moment, one meeting. Every moment is what it is. Even though tea people watch each other constantly for slips in form, and gossip shamelessly about one another’s technique, in the end, in the deepest sense, there are no mistakes. This is what the Mountain meant to teach in giving his students the precious antique with the crack, the flaw, certain to break with use.

Indeed is not the height of elegance and culture having the ability to accept a lack of perfection? Humility, therefore, is an essential part of elegance.

Love and Elegance

Where among this culture is there room for the awkwardness of love and romance? To make her task even more difficult Avery makes Aurelia a lesbian, in a world where most marriages are arranged. Still part of this is OK, since no one really shows their feelings for anyone directly, and more poetic writings and gifts create the greatest points of expression, consider when Aurelia recieves a gift from her lover Inko:

Unspooling a puff of white tissue, I found a water-lily-shaped wafer of pressed sugar. I had not been forgotten; my eyes stung from gratitude.

Eyes stung from gratitude. That is just great writing, you can understand the power of the gesture way more than the perpetual (sometimes half-empty) "I love yous" thrown about in society today.

The Embodiment of Elegance and Beauty

If there was one character that embodied the grace and beauty of temae and Tea Culture it was Yukako, older sister and master to Aurelia. Consider Aurelia's thoughts when Yukako dies:

As I purified each utensil under that kiri dome, I felt her (Yukako) beside me, prodding me here and there with her fan: like so. Like so. I felt her as I had when I was small, folder her fingers around mine…My body had known hers this intimately, I thought.

This passage describes how Aurelia learned temae from Yukako, and how the exchange of teaching and culture could brought them together, even behind the formal rigidity of the world, or was it the feeling of accomplishment to follow precise rules that created the opening for affection?

Yukako was dead, I learned, reading at home that night. She died some twelve years before, in 1916. My very first response, as with almost every interaction I had with Japanese people, was embarrassment: how rude of me to think she’d never die! How selfish! My second response was surprise: how could she have succumbed to anything so petty, so ordinary, as death?

Yukakos suffering, Kenji said, had been intense but brief, and she had gone about dying with the same attentiveness and vigor with which she’s lived.

These two passages summarize the perfection of tea-culture, of being something more bigger than life, yet unable to escape it. Like the coming Westernization of Japan in the late 1800s destroyed the elegance of tea culture, so even Yukako had to submit to mortality, and when she does so, she does not make the inelegant move to escape her fate, but cooperates with it in honor and beauty.

If Yukako had given me one single-edged gift, it was this: how to love this soft air, this wash of light-flooded leaves, this sun hitting red brick, this one day in all the world.

What is the amazing thing about the human condition is that we have a million different ways with which to perceive the outside world, and yet how often do we stop to appreciate it? What is the beauty of each passing moment? What is the benefit of cultivating the beauty, grace, intelligence, artfulness, to appreciate it?

Ellis Avery and Japan
Avery herself studied Japanese Tea Ceremony in N.Y. City (where she lives) and Kyoto, for 5 years. A large element of this book is Aurelia's trouble being integrated into Japanese culture. Reading this book it is important to keep in mind that it is a story depicting Japanese culture as seen from the outside. I do not mean to bash Avery on this, any book trying to describe a culture would be difficult, but it seems like an important fact to note with a book so rich in describing the culture of Japan as it transitioned to Westernization in the late 1800s.

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