The Teahouse Fire

In the mid-nineteenth century, Japan's cultural traditions are changing. Taking shelter in a teahouse, an American orphan named Aurelia Bernard will witness some of the most profound of those changes. Barbara Caruso offers a signature rendering of this lush historical novel. As ever, her narration is finely nuanced and lapidary. Like a talented watercolorist, she tints the story with accent and characterization, from the exhausted French voice of Aurelia's dying mother to the musical Japanese intonations of Shin Yukako, Aurelia's friend and rival. A tea ceremony is a studied affair, and, accordingly, little moves quickly in this novel. But with Caruso to listen to, who's in a hurry? A.C.S. (c) AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

Starred review from October 30, 2006
In 1865, nine-year-old Aurelia Caillard is taken from New York to Japan by her missionary uncle Charles while her ailing mother dies at home. Charles soon vanishes in a fire (not the one of the title), leaving Aurelia orphaned and alone in Kyoto. She is taken in by Yukako, the teenage daughter of the Shin family, master teachers of temae
, or tea ceremony. Aurelia, narrating as an elderly woman, tells of living as Yukako's servant and younger sister, and how what begins as grateful puppy love for Yukako matures over years into a deeply painful unrequited obsession. Against a backdrop of a convulsively Westernizing Japan, Avery brings the conflicts of modernization into the teahouse, and into Aurelia and Yukako's beds, where jealousy over lovers threatens to tear them apart. In one memorable instance, Yukako, struggling to bring money in for the family, crosses class lines and gives temae
lessons to a geisha in exchange for lessons on the shamisen
, a seductive (and potentially profitable) string instrument. Eventually stuck in a painful marriage, Yukako labors to adapt the ancient tea ceremony to the changing needs of the modern world, resulting in a breathtaking confrontation. Avery, making her debut, has crafted a magisterial novel that is equal parts love story, imaginative history and bildungsroman, a story as alluring as it is powerful.

March 26, 2007
Those expecting another great audio, like Elaine Erika Davis's rendition of Memoirs of a Geisha
, are sure to be disappointed, but the plodding pace of this new work of history cloaked under a fictional kimono is not the fault of Barbara Caruso but of its author. The minute details of the tea ceremony as it was transformed by historical events are not interspersed with enough plot for Caruso to keep the story moving. Unfortunately, Aurelia's obsession with Yukako, who saved her from the sad fate of European orphans in a strange land, is the subplot of Yukako's drive to save the tea ceremony from obscurity. Caruso gives Aurelia's voice all the wide-eyed wonder of Gulliver among the Lilliputians, but since Aurelia recounts her life in her old age, this tone is a bit forced. Yukako and other women are nicely individualized, but men tend to grunt out their words. Listeners fascinated by Japanese history will be rewarded by a compelling look at an elegant tradition that is sadly too slow and ritualized for Americans who measure life in nanoseconds. Simultaneous release with the Riverhead hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 30).