The Book of Tea

Brought to you by Penguin

This Penguin Classic is performed by Japanese actor Sadao Ueda, known for his appearances in Spectre, London has Fallen and What We Did on Our Holiday.

For a generation adjusting painfully to the demands of a modern industrial and commercial society, Asia came to represent an alternative vision of the good life: aesthetically austere, socially aristocratic, and imbued with spirituality. The Book of Tea was originally written in English and sought to address the inchoate yearnings of disaffected Westerners. In a flash of inspiration, Okakura saw that the formal tea party as practiced in New England was a distant cousin of the Japanese tea ceremony, and that East and West had thus "met in the tea-cup."