Tuesday, July 3, 2012

My experience with tea comic


On my video recorder, I can register some keywords that I’m interested in.  It automatically records the TV programs related to the keywords.  Of course, I’ve registered the keyword chanoyu, or The Way of Tea.  In the recorded shows, there is an anime every week.  I’m not an anime or comic enthusiast, so I’ve always deleted the show.  However, I sometimes check it a little before deleting.  It is a story about ancient tea masters.  It slowly drew my attention.

I found out that the anime is based on comic books.  I’m not sure if it is common worldwide, but in Japan you can rent comics.  I have rented the original comics.  It is entitled Hyoge Mono.  The comic is regarded as fiction but its outline is still based on the actual history.  The story is about one of the Rikyu’s disciples, Oribe Furuta. 



Oribe was a samurai warrior and also a tea master.  The episodes tell how he lived in the warring States period.  Expensive utensils were even used as a gift in war negotiations.  While tea people sought the beauty in tea, greed, conspiracies and selfish ambitions were involved.  That is the interesting part.  You will find Oribe’s humorous and distinctive character in the course of flourishing his way of tea.



This is the face when Oribe found out that Rikyu was using a cracked lid on the tea container.  He was glad to know that his idea was not wrong and Rikyu has the same aesthetic sense. 


NHK  Hyouge Mono >>>  http://www9.nhk.or.jp/anime/hyouge/


9 comments:

  1. Comic book rental is not common in the US. Maybe a few Asian grocery stores offer it though. But it is more common to borrow books for free from the library (the library has comic books too) than to rent them.

    I am glad to hear your thoughts about this manga! I will try to find it here!

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    1. We have manga-kissa, or comic cafes. They have coffee and also a lot of comic books in the café, and customers can read any books. It’s usually charged per hour. I wish that our library had comic books too.

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  2. So sad nobody has translated this manga-I'd love to read it.

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    1. I hope someone will translate it (^-^)

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    2. I don't know anything about this website, but I just found this place to read a translation of it: http://mangafox.me/manga/hyougemono/

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    3. Ah, I just read it, and that website only has the first six of 14 chapters. But those first six were good!

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  3. I've better read INOUE tea master, HYOUGE MONO is not credible and rather insulting for japanese culture. Beside, the fact of showing SEN Soeki fond of black things is nonsense, the characters seems not japanese?rather americans from the godfather. ah ah ah.

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    1. HYOUGE MONO is basically a fiction. I found it pretty interesting. Is INOUE tea master also a comic? Maybe, I have to try it.

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