Noriko Morishita - The Wisdom of Tea: Life Lessons from the Japanese Tea Ceremony

First published in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin in 2020.

First Japanese edition published in 2002 by ASUKA SHINSHA Ltd., Tokyo.

Japanese paperback edition published in 2008 by SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co., Ltd., Tokyo.

First English edition published in Japan as Every Day a Good Day: Fifteen lessons I learned about happiness from Japanese tea culture by Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture in 2019 as part of the JAPAN LIBRARY project.

This English edition distributed in Australia and New Zealand published by arrangement with SHINCHOSHA Publishing Co., Ltd. c/o Tuttle-Mori Agency, Inc.

NICHINICHI KORE KOJITSU: OCHA GA OSHIETEKURETA 15 NO SHIAWASE Noriko Morishita 2002. All rights reserved.

Translated by Eleanor Goldsmith.

English translation copyright Japan Publishing Industry Foundation for Culture, 2019.

The moral right of the translator has been asserted.

Photography by Katsuhiko Ushiro.

Additional photography by Mitsuyoshi Hirano (Shinchosha Photography Department) where noted by an asterisk [*].

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Australian Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its educational purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to the Copyright Agency (Australia) under the Act.

Allen & Unwin

83 Alexander Street

Crows Nest NSW 2065

Australia

Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100

Email:

Web: www.allenandunwin.com

ISBN 978 1 76087 854 2

eISBN 978 1 76087 424 7

Illustrations by Mika Tabata (cover and chapter openers) and Itsu Okamura (tea terms).

Set by Midland Typesetters, Australia.

Translators Note: The Hepburn system of romanization is used for Japanese terms, including the names of persons and places. Long vowels in Japanese words are represented by macrons, except in familiar place names. Japanese names are given in Western orderpersonal name first, surname lastwith the exception of certain historical figures like Sen no Riky, who are better known by their names in Japanese order. Practitioners of the Way of Tea avoid the term tea ceremony, so this cultural practice is generally rendered in the text as Tea, much as the Chinese philosophical tradition Dao is often translated simply as the Way. Romanized Tea terminology is used liberally in the text as a means of enabling the reader to accompany the author on her journey along this initially baffling path, but a list of tea terms is provided at the end for reference.

Foreword

Every Saturday afternoon, I walk to a house about ten minutes away from my own. It is an old house, with a big paperplant in a pot outside the entrance. Rattling open the sliding door, I am greeted by glistening water droplets on the entrance hall floor and the smooth scent of charcoal. From the garden, I hear a faint babble of running water.

I enter a quiet room overlooking that garden to kneel on the tatami-covered floor, boil water, whisk tea, and drink it. And I simply repeat that processagain and again.

I have been coming to this weekly Tea lesson for twenty-five years, since I was a university student.

Even now, I often get the procedures wrong. Many elements remain opaque to me, making me wonder why we do them at all. My feet go numb. The etiquette frustrates me. I have no idea how long it will take me to understand everything completely. Whats so great about Tea, anyway? friends sometimes ask me. Why have you carried on with it for so long?

When I was ten years old, my parents took me to see a film called La Strada, directed by Federico Fellini. One can only describe this tale of poor itinerant entertainers as bleak. Its meaning escaped me entirely, and I could not understand why a movie like this was considered a masterpiece. To my mind, it had nothing on Disney.

But when I watched it again ten years later, as a university student, I was shocked. Gelsominas theme song sounded familiar to me, but apart from that it was like seeing the film for the first time.

So that was what La Strada was all about, I thought. I sat in the pitch-black movie theater crying my eyes out, my heartstrings torn to shreds.

In the years that followed, I fell in love and experienced the trauma of heartbreak myself. Suffering setback after setback in my search for a job, I continued to seek my own place in the world. After a decade and more of these admittedly pedestrian struggles, I watched La Strada again in my mid-thirties.

Once more, there were so many scenes that I did not remember seeing before, lines that I did not recall having heard. Giulietta Masinas flawless performance as the naive heroine Gelsomina was painfully poignant. Zampan, too, was no longer simply a cruel brute; lying prostrate on the beach under the stars, his body wracked with sobs, he now seemed a pitiful old man as he mourned the death of the girl he had abandoned. Humans are such miserable creatures, I thought. Tears rolled down my face in an endless stream.

Each time I watched La Strada, it was an entirely different film. And it deepened with every viewing.

In this world, there are things that we understand immediately and things that take time to comprehend. Once is enough for the former type of experience. But things in the latter category, like Fellinis La Strada, reveal themselves to us only gradually, undergoing a slow metamorphosis over multiple encounters. And each time we understand a little more, we realize that we had only been seeing a tiny fragment of the whole.

Tea is exactly like that.

When I was twenty, I thought of Tea as nothing but etiquette and rules. There was nothing pleasant about that feeling of being forced into a mold. What made the situation worse was that I had no idea what I was doing, no matter how many times I did it. And even though I could not remember a single thing, the procedures and combinations of utensils would change according to the weather or climatic conditions that very day. When the seasons changed, the layout of the whole room would be drastically altered. I experienced the endless cycles of the tea room for years and years with only the vaguest awareness of what it all meant.

Then one day, quite out of the blue, I noticed the tepid smell of rain in the air. Oh, theres a shower on the way, I thought. The droplets that pelted the trees and plants in the garden sounded different from before. Afterward, the air was musty with the smell of earth.

Until that moment, I had only ever thought of rain as waterand odorless water, at thatthat fell from the sky. Soil had not had a smell, either. It was as though I had been looking out at the world from within an upturned glass jar, and then someone had lifted the glass and let the seasons reach my senses of smell and hearing. It reminded me that I too was a seasonal creature, no different from a frog that could identify the smell of the pond where it was born. * The cherry blossom always reached full bloom in early April each year. In mid-June, the rain would start to pour down, as if by appointment. I was astounded by this entirely unremarkable fact, which had taken me almost until the age of thirty to notice.