The Scent of Sake by Joyce Lebra (Avon)

“She was taught to submit, to obey… but she dreamed of an empire.” 

Rie is a nineteen-year-old woman. She is the heir to the House of Omura, a sake brewing family in Kobe. As a young girl, Rie loved the yeasty smell of brewing sake. However, sake brewing was a man’s job. Women weren’t allowed in the kura where the sake was made. 

“Let a woman enter the brewery and the sake will sour”, the old ones always said. It was a warning her mother often repeated since she was a child. It was the women’s duty to scrub out the sake barrels though and Rie always tried to clean them as near to the kura as she could get and not once has the sake gone sour. 

The Scent of Sake is an epic family spanning generations and focusing on a woman who was told she could never be the head of house for the simple fact that she was a woman. Now that she is of marriageable age, her mother has found a husband for her. She knew her parents were expecting her to continue the line of Kinzaemon, the patriarch of the family. Her father was Kinzaemon IX. 

In feudal Japan, everyone knew that brewing sake was exclusively a man’s world. Rie continues to feel the guilt for having taken her eyes off her younger Toichi when she was eight years old. She thought if she were more careful, he would not have fallen into the well. Now, Rie is the oldest and sole heir to the empire. 

Rie’s father could have brought in the son of a geisha but with the merchants of the Kansai area, they preferred a mukoyoshi which means to adopt a husband for the daughter. Rie’s mother, Hana, had found a good match with Jihei, the son of another brewing family. 

Unfortunately, Jihei had no head for business. He spent most of his time either drinking or hanging out with geishas. Although Rie was repulsed by the man, she knew it was in the family’s interest to get pregnant and bear an heir. 

Rie does get pregnant but has a miscarriage. She has also learned that her husband, Jihei, has had a child with a geisha and bore him a son. Her parents tell her that she has no choice but to bring the child into the Omura house so he will become the heir to the dynasty. So now Rie has to raise a child that isn’t her own. 

For Rie, it’s one tragedy after another but she has a plan of her own. She secretly meets with a man she fancies, who also fancies her, they have a tryst, and she times everything so that Jihei will think it is his child she is carrying when she gets pregnant again, but she has a girl. 

Everything Rie does, she does for the House. She took her mother’s advice to heart and has to “kill the self” in order to survive. She refuses to relinquish the power to her husband or to his son. The family stamp remains in her possession, even after her parents die, it is Rie who holds the real power in the House of Omura. 

Joyce Lebra weaves a story that could be adapted into a taiga drama on NHK, the Japan Broadcasting Company. Taiga dramas are a series that focuses on a historical figure and based on historical facts. She thoroughly researched the history of sake making, speaking with different brewers from Akita and Niigata in the north to Kyushu in the south. The story is enough to make you want to imbibe yourself. ~Ernie Hoyt