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 who’s 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 is a man’s job. Women aren’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 Rie was a child. It’s the women’s duty to scrub out the sake barrels though and Rie always tries to clean them as near to the kura as she could get. Not once has the sake gone sour. 

The Scent of Sake is a family epic that spans generations and focuses on a woman who has been told she could never be the head of the House of Omura, simply because of her gender. Now that she is of marriageable age, her mother has found a husband for her. She knew her parents are expecting her to continue the line of Kinzaemon, the patriarch of the family. Her father is Kinzaemon IX. 

In feudal Japan, everyone knowsthat brewing sake is exclusively a man’s world. Rie continues to feel the guilt for having taken her eyes off her younger brother Toichi when she was eight years old. She thought if she had been 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 as with all the merchants of the Kansai area, he prefers a mukoyoshi which means to adopt a husband for his daughter. Rie’s mother, Hana, has found a good match with Jihei, the son of another brewing family. 

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

Rie does get pregnant but has a miscarriage. She also learns that her husband, Jihei, has had a son with a geisha. 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 and they have a tryst. 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 takes 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. ~Ernie Hoyt