Nonfiction · 1906
The Book of Tea
An essay in seven short chapters, written not to explain the etiquette of a Japanese tea ceremony but the whole aesthetic and moral outlook that grew up around it — Teaism, a philosophy of imperfection, restraint, and the beauty of ordinary things — traced from its roots in Taoism and Zen through the design of the tea-room, the arrangement of flowers, and the vocation of the tea-master, and closing with the death of the sixteenth-century tea-master Sen no Rikyū, who prepared one final bowl of tea for his guests before taking his own life on his lord's order.
Kakuzō Okakura wrote the book directly in English, without a translator, while serving as curator of the Chinese and Japanese department at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts. Fox, Duffield and Company published it in New York in 1906, aimed at a Western readership Okakura felt understood Japan only as an exotic curiosity or a successful imitator of the West.
This Bibliomancer edition presents the complete text of all seven chapters.
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The text is free of copyright. This edition was prepared from an authoritative digitisation, processed by Bibliomancer under its own review protocol; every automated correction is recorded in its transformation log. Rights assessed for CA, EU, GB, US.
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About the author
1862–1913 · Victorian
Kakuzo Okakura (1862–1913) was born in Yokohama shortly after Japan's forced opening to Western trade, and came of age as the Meiji government pursued rapid, wholesale Westernisation; alarmed at the resulting contempt for Japan's own artistic traditions, he co-founded the Tokyo School of Fine Arts in 1889 and later the Japan Art Institute, championing traditional Japanese painting against the tide of imported academic realism. Dismissed from the Fine Arts School amid a personal scandal in 1898, he travelled and lectured in India and the United States, eventually becoming curator of the Chinese and Japanese art collection at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where he spent much of his later career. Writing directly in English for a Western readership he felt had reduced Japanese culture to charming curiosities, he published The Ideals of the East (1903), The Awakening of Japan (1904), and The Book of Tea (1906), using the tea ceremony as a window onto a broader Japanese aesthetic and spiritual philosophy. He died in Japan at fifty.
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