Told in an enchanting and unforgettable voice, The Teahouse Fire is a lively, provocative, and lushly detailed historical novel of epic scope and compulsive readability. Aurelia becomes Yukako’s closest companion, and they, the Shin family, and all of Japan face a time of great challenges and uncertainty. We see it all through the eyes of Aurelia, an American orphan adopted by the Shin family, proprietors of a tea ceremony school, after their daughter, Yukako, finds her hiding on their grounds. It was a period when wearing a different color kimono could make a political statement, when women stopped blackening their teeth to profess an allegiance to Western ideas, and when Japan’s most mysterious rite the tea ceremony became not just a sacramental meal, but a ritual battlefield. Doing so, she transformed a men’s art into a women’s art: her story is the inspiration for Yukako, one of the two heroines of The Teahouse Fire. The story of two women whose lives intersect in late-nineteenth-century Japan, The Teahouse Fire is also a portrait of one of the most fascinating places and times in all of history Japan as it opens its doors to the West. She changed the fate of tea ceremony in the late 1800s by getting tea into the curriculum of the newly established girls’ schools. Like attending seasons of elegant tea parties each one resplendent with character and drama.
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