Since its discovery in an Ethiopian rainforest centuries
ago, coffee has brewed up a rich and troubled history, according
to Uncommon Grounds, a sweeping book by business writer
Mark Pendergrast. Over the years, the beverage has fomented revolution,
spurred deforestation, enriched a few while impoverishing the
many, and addicted millions with its psychoactive caffeine. Coffee
is now the world's second most valuable legal commodity, behind
oil, according to Pendergrast, who is also author of For God,
Country, and Coca-Cola.
That a nation should construct one of its most resonant
national ceremonies round a cup of tea will surely strike a chord
of sympathy with at least some readers of this review. To many
foreigners, nothing is so quintessentially Japanese as the tea
ceremony--more properly, "the way of tea"--with its
austerity, its extravagantly minimalist stylization, and its concentration
of extreme subtleties of meaning into the simplest of actions.
The Book of Tea is something of a curiosity: written in
English by a Japanese scholar (and issued here in bilingual form),
it was first published in 1906, in the wake of the naval victory
over Russia with which Japan asserted its rapidly acquired status
as a world-class military power. It was a peak moment of Westernization
within Japan. Clearly, behind the publication was an agenda, or
at least a mission to explain. Around its account of the ceremony,
The Book of Tea folds an explication of the philosophy,
first Taoist, later Zen Buddhist, that informs its oblique celebration
of simplicity and directness--what Okakura calls, in a telling
phrase, "moral geometry." And the ceremony itself? Its
greatest practitioners have always been philosophers, but also
artists, connoisseurs, collectors, gardeners, calligraphers, gourmets,
flower arrangers.
