Read an excerpt below.

On the fourth floor of the Imperial Hotel of Tokyo, there are many similar doors, and among these doors only one can bring you to another world. Out of the carpeted hallway and into a quiet alley of grey pebbles. What awaits you on the other side, though, is not the magical world of Narnia but the ancestral experience of the Japanese tea ceremony, or “Chanoyu.”

I step into the alley where a gentle smile and a bow await me. It seems in here I’m a person of importance. The lady turns around and ambles away. I follow her light-blue kimono, skipping from one paving stone to the next. A sea of pebbles bathes the reassuring slabs: I look at the tiny stones and the screech of a fork rattling a plate blasts in my brain. Don’t step there. The lady stops. To my left, starting at my knees but not going higher than my hips, is a narrow opening. This is the “nijiriguchi,” the entrance to the tea house. The arduous tasks of removing my winter boots then writhing inside the tea house while carrying my backpack gives new meaning to the “elephant in a china shop” but soon enough, I am safely seated with my buttocks on my heels in a four-and-a-half-tatami room that smells of straw and freshness. “Inside the tea house,” the lady comments, “all guests are equal. All guests are forced to bow in humbleness as they go through the entrance. Originally, the tea ceremony was performed for warriors. Swords were left outside. The tea house is a haven of peace where important discussion may take place.”

While Sen no Rikyū (1522-1591) has entered posterity as the Way of Tea’s most influential developer, tea master Murata Shukō had already laid the ceremony’s foundations of purity and simplicity in his 1488 Letter of the Heart. Nonetheless, Sen no Rikyū is the one who propelled Chanoyu to the whole of Japan during his service to the military rulers Oda Nobunaga and Toyotomi Hideyoshi.

Born the son of a warehouse owner in the autonomous seaport of Sakai, Rikyū grew up in one of the wealthiest cities of Japan at the time, an ebullient place of commerce and art. It didn’t get more high life than that. I hence suspect Rikyū was an early sufferer from the nausea of too much.

A perfect antithesis to the pain of not enough, the nausea of too much sheathes its victims until no fresh air can reach their lungs. It is a slow suffocation of the soul. Too much food, too much stuff, too much clutter of things broken and things unused, too much meaningless conversation. The guests have gone home and there you remain, among the half-empty bottles and the half-bitten canapes, and there’s no true friend to laugh with; suddenly, you feel empty and cold. Maybe if you bought that watch you liked so much in the store you’d feel a little better. Such is the nausea of too much. It is being surrounded by things you don’t need and you don’t enjoy. Sen no Rikyū knew the dangers of a materialistic life. He designed a remedy: a place so barren of distractions that the soul has to quiet. In there, there is no more to be had and so you settle for what there is. This remedy is called “Wabi-cha.”