Teahouse Fire

My Recommendation: The Teahouse Fire

My thoughts: It was really slow to get into (I started it 2 different times) but if you are a reader that is interested in Asian cultures and want to get a look into the Japanese culture, this is a really great book for that.  From this book I learned that Japan is an extremely subtle culture where one gesture or gift can have a series of meanings.  Every culture I have grown up with is extremely obvious to the point of being vulgar, as I have become.  If someone is trying to tell me something, I want it said in the plainest language possible.  It is exactly the opposite in Japan - not just in language but in the clothes you wear, the gifts you give, every action you make.  It focuses on the tea ceremony which was an art, and has become almost extinct in the country.  It was a great look into the Japanese culture - and at the same time a really good story to keep you interested (lesbian love affairs? lol).   

 Shelfari Description:

see section historyA sweeping debut novel drawn from a history shrouded in secrets about two women-one American, one Japanese-whose fates become entwined in the rapidly changing world of late-nineteenth-century Japan. When nine-year-old Aurelia Bernard takes shelter in Kyoto's beautiful and mysterious Baishian teahouse after a fire one night in 1866, she is unaware of the building's purpose. She has just fled the only family she's ever known: after her French immigrant mother died of cholera in New York, her abusive missionary uncle brought her along on his assignment to Christianize Japan. She finds in Baishian a place that will open up entirely new worlds to her- and bring her a new family. It is there that she discovers the woman who will come to define the next several decades of her life, Shin Yukako, daughter of Kyoto's most important tea master and one of the first women to openly practice the sacred ceremony known as the Way of Tea. For hundreds of years, Japan's warriors and well-off men would gather in tatami-floored structures- teahouses- to participate in an event that was equal parts ritual dance and sacramental meal. Women were rarely welcome, and often expressly forbidden. But in the late nineteenth century, Japan opened its doors to the West for the first time, and the seeds of drastic changes that would shake all of Japanese society, even this most civilized of arts, were planted. Taking her for the abandoned daughter of a prostitute rather than a foreigner, the Shin family renames Aurelia "Urako" and adopts her as Yukako's attendant and surrogate younger sister. Yukako provides Aurelia with generosity, wisdom, and protection as she navigates a culture that is not accepting of outsiders. From her privileged position at Yukako's side, Aurelia aids in Yukako's crusade to preserve the tea ceremony as it starts to fall out of favor under pressure of intense Westernization. And Aurelia herself is embraced and rejected as modernizing Japan embraces and rejects an era of radical change. An utterly absorbing story 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.