Readers Place

Ellis Avery interview/review

1. In what ways was the real Yukako similar to the fictional one and in what ways was she different?  Did you feel any extra responsibility basing a character on a real person?

There is a tantalizing dearth of information about the real Yukako available in English.  I do know her dates of birth, marriage, and death, the year her first son was born, and the year her husband retired, at age 33, to hand over the household to his twelve-year-old son, which suggests that he was really turning it over to Yukako.  By hewing pretty close to these bare facts, I was able to imagine my story all the more vividly, the way the rules of a sonnet create a taut form inside of which infinite freedom is possible. 

If I feel extra responsibility, it’s in making clear that I am writing fiction, not history.  The historical facts were a necessary springboard for the novel, and certainly I did a lot of research on daily life in Japan in the late eighteen-hundreds, but I’m not claiming to tell the story of the real Yukako or her family, to whom I owe infinite gratitude for making tea accessible to people outside Japan worldwide.  Shin Yukako, my fictional heroine, can trace her ancestry back to the real-life founder of tea ceremony, Sen Rikyu, but her fictional branch of the family splits off from the real one hundreds of years before the novel begins. 

1. What fascinated you most about your research and how was that incorporated into the novel?

When I first discovered that there was this real person, Yukako, who broke down the barriers that excluded women from tea ceremony, I was so excited.  I thought of her as a kind of feminist icon.  The more I read, however, the more I realized that Yukako lived through the biggest cultural upheaval Japan has ever encountered: a top-down program of radical Westernization that began in 1868.  Overnight, the entire ruling class, which had been dependent on handouts from the overlord for 250 years, lost its funding, which meant that all the traditional arts suddenly hit the skids.  This information complicated, in a fascinating way, how I thought about my character: the Yukako who made tea accessible to women as an altruistic gesture became a Yukako who did it to save her family.  But how did she feel about what she had accomplished?  Only fiction can tackle a question like that. 

1. As much as The Teahouse Fire is Yukako’s story, it’s also the story of its narrator, Aurelia, the American girl Yukako takes under her wing.  Could you tell us about her?

Well, Aurelia has no basis in tea history at all!  When I decided to tell Yukako’s story, I needed a voice with which to tell it: using an omniscient voice would make it only too clear that I’m separated from this story by time, language, and culture, and writing it from Yukako’s point of view would only compound the problem: who am I to presume to know how a 19th century Kyoto woman would think and speak— in English, no less?  So when I began, Aurelia was both an expression of my own limits as a storyteller and an accessible window into an unfamiliar world.  But once I started writing in her voice, her story became a necessary counterpart to Yukako’s.

1. This novel takes place over 100 years ago.  What makes it relevant to our time?

At the deepest level, my book addresses an issue preoccupying everyone in the world today: what happens when cultures collide?  Instead of reducing cultural encounter to aggression and conquest, I offer a more subtle and realistic story in which members of both cultures are changed.  My two heroines, Yukako and Aurelia, give me a lens through which to explore cultural exchange at its most dramatic, both on a large scale— the enormous changes Japan underwent after “opening” to the West in the mid 1800s—and on an intimate scale: the experience of a child suddenly compelled to grow up in a new world, a new culture, a new language. 

The other big question that haunted this novel at its inception, and haunts many of us lucky enough to make and consume art today, is, what do beauty and justice have to say to one another?  How can you hold those two things together, an art as refined as tea ceremony and the backbreaking labour required to make it possible?  The fact that the budget of one Hollywood blockbuster alone could feed, clothe, and educate thousands of people?I did my best by this question with The Teahouse Fire , but I still have a long way to go.