Clifford recommend this book to me, and since I can’t resist a book with the word “tea” in the title, I started reading it as soon as possible!

The Last Tea Bowl Thief is a novel centered around a remarkable tea bowl known as “yabo”. The book alternates between the past, where we find out how Yakibo was stolen (twice!) and the present, as Nori brings the bowl to the auction house where Robin works as a way to raise money to support her and her comatose grandmother. There’s a bit of plot tension from the fact that the tea bowl keeps getting stolen, as you may expect.

As with any dual-timeline story, there is a timeline I like better and it’s probably not a surprise that it’s the story set in the past. Apart from my liking of historical fiction, I also liked the stories and ideas explored in that subplot a lot better. In the 17th Century, yabo was made by a talented but blind potter (Yakibo) who is trying to get rid of his worldly attachments. In order to prevent a piece of art from being destroyed, since Yakibo made these tea bowls to represent his worldly attachments, which he would then destroy, and in order to advance his standing in court, a poet steals the bowl and brings it to his lord.

It’s a pretty interesting question that’s raised: what right does an artist have to destroy their own work? Is there a greater obligation towards society to preserve art, or is the most important thing the artist’s wishes? The book falls firmly on the latter half but I wish that this theme was explored a bit more fully in the novel instead of just being raised and then dropped. Personally, I think the answer is going to depend on whether you prize the right of the individual over the group or vice versa.

As for the characters in the present, I’m afraid I didn’t quite like them. Nori is supposed to be doing this to pay for her grandmother’s hospital fees, but she jumps straight into selling a bowl that she knows her grandmother doesn’t want sold instead of … calling up people who owe them money? I would have thought that calling in debts owed to you would be the first step in making sure you have enough money. Robin, despite being fluent in Japanese (as the book makes it very clear), will still use her foreigner status to deliberately ignore body language/social behaviour, which is really why the image of “foreigners cannot adapt to Japanese society” never goes away. Okay, Robin’s behaviour is mostly a pet peeve since I used to live in Japan, but basically I didn’t really connect to the two protagonists in the present-day timeline.

Overall, this is an interesting story about how tea bowls can be more than a vessel for drinking tea, and how our attachments to things or ideals drive us along the path of life.