Book description
'When I was nine, in the city now called Kyoto, I changed my fate...
What I asked for? Any life but this one.'
When Aurelia flees the fire that kills her missionary uncle and
leaves her orphaned and alone in nineteenth-century Japan, she has no
idea how quickly her wish will be answered. Knowing only a few words
of Japanese she hides in a tea house and is adopted by the family who
own it: gradually falling in love with both the tea ceremony and with
her young mistress, Yukako.
As Aurelia grows up she devotes herself to the family and its
failing fortunes in the face of civil war and western intervention,
and to Yukako's love affairs and subsequent marriage. But her feelings
for her mistress are never reciprocated and as tensions mount in the
household Aurelia begins to realise that to the world around her she
will never be anything but an outsider.
A lushly detailed, spellbinding story, The Teahouse Fire is
an unforgettable debut.
Ellis Avery studied the Japanese tea ceremony for five years in New
York and Kyoto, and now teaches Creative Writing at Columbia University.
Her work has appeared in
The Village Voice
,
Kyoto Journal
,
LIT
and
Pacific Reader
and has been performed at New York's Expanded Arts Theatre. She lives
in New York City.
