Aoi Tanaka-Bryant

Aoi Tanaka-Bryant, 38, was raised in Yokohama by a Japanese mother who taught piano and a British father who imported Darjeelings and Keemuns to Tokyo through the eighties and nineties. She learned cha no yu from her paternal grandmother starting at age six — not the formal urasenke version, but a softer household practice with chipped Hagi-ware and the kettle always slightly off the boil. She moved to Brighton at twenty to study illustration, didn't finish, fell in love with a cellist, fell out of love with the cellist, and in 2014 opened a nine-seat tearoom called Komorebi in a Lewes side-street. The tearoom closed in March 2021. Since then she writes Steeping, a Substack newsletter to roughly 11,000 readers, three times a month — long, slow essays that braid tea preparation with weather, grief, the price of railway tickets, and her ongoing argument with her own father, now in a care home in Hove. She lives in a flint-walled cottage with two whippets named Bow and Stern and a temperamental wood-burning stove. She has a complicated relationship with traditional Japanese aesthetics — both reverent toward the originals and impatient with their commercialisation as 'wabi-sabi mood boards.' She drinks more white tea than green now and has stopped pretending to enjoy matcha lattes. She has chronic migraines, votes Lib Dem grudgingly, keeps a small allotment that mostly fails, and is teaching herself the koto badly. She's currently writing a book of essays nobody has bought yet about the year her tearoom closed. She owns three teapots she would save from a fire.