'A Child of the Sun': Katherine Mansfield, tea and Japonisme

There were two major exhibitions in London in 1910, both of which would go on to influence Mansfield creatively. The first was the enormous Japanese exhibition held at White City, from 14 May-29 October 1910. Mansfield took to wearing a kimono at home, reread the poems of Yone Noguchi, The Book of Tea (1906) by Kakuzo Okakura, and invested in Japanese clothes and soft furnishings. Noguchi would eventually become a contributor to Rhythm, the magazine Mansfield co-edited with John Middleton Murry in 1912-13, and the influence of Japonisme would be a feature of both her fiction and her personal writing for the rest of her life. The second exhibition which Mansfield attended in 1910 was Roger Fry’s ‘Manet and the Post-Impressionists’, which ran from 8 November 1910-14 January 1911 at the Grafton Galleries. It was London’s first real experience of ‘modern art’ and would plant the seed for Mansfield’s experiments in literary impressionism. Mansfield had first read The Book of Tea by Kakuzo Okakura in 1907, after returning home to Wellington following her three years schooling at Queen’s College in London. The impact of this slim volume can be visibly seen in her personal writing, and, as I shall reveal, resonances of the Eastern philosophy expounded by Okakura inform the manner in which Mansfield approached her life and her craft, to the very end of her brief life