The Book of Tea by Okakura Kakuzō
Published 1906 · 18,000 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Essays, Philosophy, Nonfiction, Art
How hard is The Book of Tea to read?
The Book of Tea scores 61 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 64 out of 100
- Elegant, ornate Edwardian English written by a non-native speaker with deliberate literary ambition, carrying Japanese, Chinese and Sanskrit terms and a wide field of Taoist and Zen reference.
- Sentence structure: 62 out of 100
- Long balanced periods in the style of Pater and the aesthetic essayists, dense with subordinate clauses and epigram.
- Abstraction: 78 out of 100
- A short book that moves from a beverage to Taoist metaphysics, the aesthetics of imperfection and a theory of art appreciation, spending most of its length in general argument.
- Information density: 76 out of 100
- Chinese dynastic history, Zen lineage, tea-ceremony practice, garden and architectural theory and comparative art criticism are compressed into a hundred pages.
- Narrative indirection: 48 out of 100
- Okakura argues directly, though he makes his polemical points about Western hypocrisy through anecdote and aside rather than confrontation.
- Symbolic density: 72 out of 100
- The empty room, the low door, the single flower, the vacuum in the Taoist teaching and Rikyū's broken bowl carry the argument more than any explicit statement does.
- Ironic distance: 70 out of 100
- The book's method is graceful counterattack: the opening pages define Westerners as people who could not see civilisation until it produced a battlefield, delivered in perfect drawing-room English.
- Resolution withholding: 54 out of 100
- The argument is stated plainly, but the book closes on Rikyū's suicide and his death verse rather than a conclusion, leaving the reader with an image instead of a summary.
- Structural complexity: 44 out of 100
- Seven thematic essays in a deliberate progression from history to philosophy to architecture to flowers to a single life, without narrative complication.
How The Book of Tea is regarded
The Book of Tea holds a literary regard score of 74 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.