The Book of Tea is a small, luminous book written in English in 1906 by Okakura Kakuzō — art historian, curator, and cultural bridge between Meiji Japan and the West. In seven short chapters it argues that the Japanese tea ceremony (chanoyu) is not a quaint custom but a whole philosophy of living: an “Art of Life” built on simplicity, restraint, and the beauty of imperfect, ordinary things.

It reads like seven loose essays. It is really one argument, built like a spiral — and it does not show its hand until the last page, where the greatest tea-master turns even his own death into a work of art. Read slowly. The first paragraph already contains the whole book.