Ellis Avery’s debut novel, The Teahouse Fire (Riverhead, 2006) was inspired by five years of weekly tea ceremony study in New York and five nonstop weeks at the international headquarters of the Urasenke tradition of tea ceremony in Kyoto, Japan. A richly textured portrait of 19th century Japan on the precipice of modernity, The Teahouse Fire depicts a few intrepid individuals struggling to adapt in a radically changed and changing society. I met Ellis one Sunday in January at the Cha An teahouse in the East Village, NY. In one corner of this otherwise typical restaurant resides a three-tatami-mat teahouse where, with a special reservation, one can experience the modern practice of an ancient art. After enjoying a frothy green tea, a soybean and rice flour sweet, and the modest grace of kimono-clad tea master Norico Sakagami, Ellis was kind enough to answer a few of my questions.

Michael Signorelli: Did you have any idea that your studying Japanese tea ceremony would lead to a novel? Was this something you had in mind from the beginning?

Ellis Avery: No, I studied tea ceremony for fun, but then I got really sucked in. Early on, I started wondering: how come all tea people in history were men when all of my fellow students were women? I read the lives of the grand masters of the tradition of tea I was learning, Urasenke, and in that biography there was a woman named Sen Yukako, on whom Yukako Shin is based, who single-handedly changed the fate of the art of tea ceremony by getting tea into the newly formed girl schools. Yukako was the answer to my question, and The Teahouse Fire is her story, from the point of view of Aurelia, an American girl she takes under her wing.

Once I had that little kernel of an idea I just wanted to know more and more. Yukako had a husband who was adopted into the family, retired at age 33, and handed the household over to his twelve-year-old son. I wondered, what kind of family would that be? What kind of marriage would that be? So the novel emerged from just a few bare facts.

MS: It might be suggested that traditional Japanese society was the “loser” in the cultural exchange between East and West. Is The Teahouse Fire your tribute to what was lost?

EA: Well, I think that there’s the temptation to think of the novel as mourning for a lost world. I have a character that really embodies that sense of mourning—Yukako’s husband—who had that world not been lost would himself have been the loser. Up until 1868, when a revolution took place in Japan, there was a whole warrior class living off handouts from the state, while merchant-class guys like Yukako's husband Jiro were considered the lowest of the low. After the revolution, the samurai-- and the arts they had funded, like tea-- had nothing, and only merchants could afford to pay for samurai markers of status, like tea, while meanwhile much of Japan was rapidly westernizing. I think it’s poignant to have this Johnny-come-lately merchant-class guy embody that longing and melancholy for the samurai era.

Certainly a number of reviewers have highlighted that "lost world" feeling—yes, that’s true—but actually my book wants to tell the story of how tea ceremony wasn’t lost but unusually has thrived. It’s a successful industry in Japan. The tea family who founded the school where I studied is very wealthy and it’s because of how they adapted to the enormous changes that took place after the revolution, thanks to tough, adaptable, visionary people—like Yukako and her father. So yes, my book is about loss, but it's also about adaptation. I’m doing that both in Yukako’s story and the decisions she makes and also in Aurelia’s story—how this foreigner is able to survive in a really hostile environment.

MS: Your narrator, Aurelia or Urako, a French-American orphan, is the prism through which the setting of 19th century Japan is seen. Her introduction to tea culture is not so different from that of the reader’s—that is, the reader gains fluency and familiarity with Japanese culture at the same pace, at least proportionally, as she does. Was this something you paid particular attention to, or did it come about organically? Does that even make sense?

EA: I had to pay attention to it because by the time I was writing the novel I knew a lot about tea but I didn’t want to write for my tea teachers or for tea nerds. I wanted to write my novel for people who didn’t know much about tea ceremony but who were “game” and were interested in another culture. Or maybe they had read Memoirs of a Geisha or Shogun. I wanted to assume that the reader started out knowing nothing and I wanted a narrator who could accommodate that kind of reader.

I really started by wanting to tell Yukako’s story, and then Aurelia’s character came from my desire to find a ground from which to tell that story, a ground that felt authentic, honest, and possible for me as a 21st century native English speaker who speaks very limited Japanese and certainly doesn’t speak 19th century Kyoto dialect. Aurelia was my way in and once I started writing from her point of view I really wanted to tell her story too.

MS: It was great. You were hearing only the snippets of understanding she had. You shared her frustration and evolved along with her. That’s why I brought it up—I enjoyed that.

EA: I’m glad.

MS: I also found it interesting that Urako’s love relationship with Inko develops without any self-consciousness. Maybe I’m under the false impression that sexual relationships outside the traditional social order were looked down upon or even punished back then, but that doesn’t seem to be the case here. How are lesbian relationships historically represented in Japan? Was there a place for them? Were they ignored?

EA: There’s not a lot of material to draw conclusions from. I would say that it looks like they just turned a blind eye to them. There were no religious proscriptions against lesbianism. There wasn’t a medical discourse of perversity—nor was there in the Victorian period in England or America until the 1880’s, 1890’s with sexologists, Havelock Ellis, and so on. And my partner was writing this book about relationships between women in the Victorian period while I was writing my book, so I got to eavesdrop on her research. It doesn’t seem like there was a lesbian sexual identity per se, which meant that there wasn’t necessarily a place in or out of society. Based on that, it doesn't seem too crazy to assume that the way I wrote it is the way it might have happened, especially in an all-female environment like the geisha world. Well, we don’t know, so it doesn’t seem totally impossible.

I really didn’t get to see a lot of information; what I know is drawn from a little bit here and there. There’s pornography in the sixteen hundreds—The Life of an Amorous Woman was written by a man from a woman’s point of view. She has sex here, there, and everywhere; and one night her client is a woman dressed as a man, “I had to please her too!” It seemed more amusing and savory than shocking—that was the vibe I was getting. I got to see hand-tinted photos from the period I’m writing about of geishas fooling around together. They might have been posed—I’m sure that they were—but that they were willing to do it at all...

MS: Doesn’t put it out of the question.

EA: Yeah, so why not go for it? What’s interesting is to see that by the nineteen twenties the discourse of sexology and perversion and the invert had made its way to Japan, so people were adopting these identities and were communicating this through the very traditional Japanese form of love suicide. So you see female-female couples that were identifying themselves as couples by killing themselves together—or attempting to. I loved writing a failed love-suicide into my novel.

MS: I felt bad for Aki with her eye popped out.

EA: I know. But it seems like love-suicide was your way to show mom and dad that you liked someone else. That was your only option. An awful lot of people committed stupid love-suicide. It wasn’t really going to work. That pond was two feet deep. And there were interviews with people from that period who were like, “we didn’t think it would work,” and one of the kids dies and the other one doesn’t. It seems as pervasive as pop music in its way.

MS: It definitely goes through streaks of popularity. Well, this next one, I should have checked to see if these are actual writers—Shonagon and Murasaki—or if they were based on…

EA: No, they’re real. They’re from the 11th century.

MS: Okay, then I’ll proceed. Your narrator encounters works by Shonagon, a courtly list maker; Murasaki, a diarist and novelist; and Virginia Woolf—in particular, her novel Orlando. How did these works shape or inform The Teahouse Fire—if they did? If you had other literary influences, what were they?

EA: Well, I loved Balzac’s Cousin Bette. He just gives you one heroine after the next. It’s a non-stop heroine-fest, and I wanted to do that. I wasn’t happy just writing Aurelia, just writing Yukako. I wanted Aki to have her story. I wanted readers to have this sense that I was telling one story but there were lots of stories that could have been main-staged in their way. A sense of boundlessness.

I love Penelope Fitzgerald’s work. She started writing novels in her sixties and wrote into her late seventies. She died recently, at age 83. She’s so concise, so learned, and she wears it so lightly and elegantly. She has a book that won the National Book Critics prize called The Blue Flower that is about the poet Novalis in the late 1700s. Every scene packs such a punch. There’s so much research in it and it moves so quickly. I didn’t succeed as well as she did. With her novels you get in and get out in 140 pages, and I think I need to keep writing until my sixties to be able to do that. I re-read The Beginning of Spring a few times before starting The Teahouse Fire, to gear up.

As for Orlando, it’s the story of someone-- Orlando--who was born a man in the 1500s and is blessed by Queen Elizabeth—“never wither, never fade." So he doesn't. But at some point, after a long illness, he does turn into a woman, and goes on to live up until 1928-- which was the very year Woolf's book was published. When I was writing my book, I loved the idea that someone could be born in a world lit by torchlight and die in a world lit by hydroelectric power. In that particular time in history, so much happened that you could span different ways of thinking, different ways of experiencing the world, all in one life. So Aurelia is that Orlando character in a way.

MS: Intensified over a shorter period of time.

EA: As for Murasaki and Shonagon, they are lyrical influences that shaped how I see pre-modern Japan—their emphasis on the seasons, their terseness, their melancholy. And they also have female narrators who are devoted to their employers-- in both cases, empresses-- the way Aurelia is devoted to Yukako. What Aurelia has to learn is that her devotion-- which she experiences as romantic-- is part of a traditional Japanese convention of feudal loyalty, and if she wants that devotion reciprocated, she's going to have to look elsewhere.

Murasaki’s Tale of Genji is credited for being the first psychological novel, written in the 11th century. It took her whole life to finish and it starts out with Prince Genji's extravagant sexual adventures. Murasaki began writing in her teens or twenties and the opening has this juicy gossipy feel to it. I don’t know how old she was when she died, but the novel really changes; it becomes an exploration by a much older person of a world where there is no good, there is no evil, just longing that goes unfulfilled. It’s much darker and much less satisfying, and it ends basically mid-sentence. When I finished I threw the book across the room. It was a thousand pages! How could you do this to me?

Murasaki's example was very satisfying in trying to write about a relationship that just kind of isn’t. Aurelia thinks Yukako is the love of her life, but she isn’t. She has to grow up and “get it.” So that’s there.

MS: I had a tough time accepting that too.

EA: And Shonagun’s lists are so tersely, austerely voluptuous, and that’s tea aesthetic for me. That’s why she’s in there. That was hard for you too?

MS: Yes. I mean I understood. I learned to let go, though. How does it feel to have published your first novel? How do you feel about its reception?

EA: Relieved. Great. I wrote a book that took most of my twenties to write and nobody wanted it. I just had to put it in a drawer. That was such a disappointment. Like so many people’s first novels, my first was a coming-of-age story, my own story, so it was especially painful. So, to have a first novel published is such a relief—though, really, it’s my second.

Before The Teahouse Fire I also published a non-fiction book. It started out as prose-poems and it’ll be published as along as it isn’t called a poetry collection, so now it’s non-fiction.

My point is, that in order to dare to take on a big ambitious project like The Teahouse Fire, I had to have a lot in place in my life. I had to have an agent, I had to have a book under my belt, and I had to be in a solid relationship. So that when I started the novel, my stake was in the story rather than in me. Now, in a way, it feels like I’m being recognized as the writer I thought I was, and finally I am the writer I thought I was, thank God! It’s been received incredibly well. I feel so lucky.

MS: How do you feel promoting it? Is it fun, tiring?

EA: Well, this is fun. But sending e-mails to bookstores to see if they want me to come read or sending a lot of thank you notes each time I read-- which I want to do, you want people to remember you, you don’t want people to think “I spent twenty five dollars on your book and for what?” --is tiring. And airports and rental cars, all of that. I love getting to connect with people about the book but to get there takes a lot of steps.

I miss being a reader and a writer. Right now I feel I have this different job, and it will be nice when it’s over.

MS: How many kimonos do you have, if any?

EA: Good question! Too many. I wore them when I was doing tea so I have a few that I could never cut up. Then I have others that I make dresses out of. I love the fabric and the iconography. The more I ask people the more I learn. “Oh, I thought this was a random triangle but it’s a stack of fans. Silly me.” So it’s fun, but too many.

MS: Last question, it’s not a great capper but it looks to what you’ll do next. In a recent interview you mention that your next project has to do with Paris in the 1920s. The Teahouse Fire ends in the 1920s. Did one lead to the other?

EA: Well, originally, the last scene did take place in Paris. Aurelia and Inko both got older and Inko passed away of old age. Aurelia, not giving into despair, goes to live in Paris alone rather than just staying home and tending Inko's grave. I thought maybe she could meet…well, there’s a whole bunch of people she could meet—Gerturde Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, Sylvia Beach. There’s a whole world of women coming into their own on the left bank in Paris in the 1920s. But I had to not bite off more than I could chew. My editor really worked with me to get it down from a forty-page ending to an eight-page ending. It’s a better book for that. But I didn’t get to do everything I wanted and I think there’s a whole other book there.

MS: I guess it’s good to leave off while you still have gas in the tank.

EA: Yeah. It’s not the same characters, though. Aurelia doesn’t live on. It will be a very different book.

MS: Thank you very much for answering my questions. It really was a treat.

EA: You’re welcome.

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In addition to The Teahouse Fire, Ellis Avery is also the author of a nonfiction book, The Smoke Week (Gival Press, 2003), an award-winning personal account of life in Manhattan after 9/11. Her work has also appeared on stage at New York’s Expanded Arts Theater and in print in Publishers Weekly, Kyoto Journal, and the Village Voice. In 2001, Three Lines, One Road, a year’s worth of daily haiku exchanged between Avery and Melissa Demian, was a finalist in the National Poetry Series.

Michael Signorelli blogs for Small Spiral Notebook, CruelestMonth.com, and OliveReader.com. He works as an editorial assistant for Ecco and Harper Perennial.