Singing with Invisible Worlds: Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time

Rethinking life with microbes through the art of natural fermentation

Within us and around us, microbes are everywhere, constantly reshaping what it means to be human as we interact with them―sometimes knowingly, sometimes not. Singing with Invisible Worlds theorizes human–microbe relationships through a rare ethnographic account of the fermentation process at the 350-year-old Terada Honke, one of only two natural sake breweries in Japan.

Painting a vivid picture of how sake brewers collaborate with bacteria, molds, and yeasts, Maya Hey reveals that ambient microbes are not controlled but courted, cultivated, and deliberately choreographed. As the brewers adapt to shifting microbial dynamics, they engage in what Hey calls an “improvisational ethic”―a way of responding to the unknown with care and attentiveness through each phase of blooming and waning across weeks, months, and even centuries. In documenting these remarkable practices, Singing with Invisible Worlds offers an intimate, situated understanding of how we can come to know and live with microbial life, with implications for feminist theory, science and technology studies, and multispecies ethnography.

Unsettling simplistic notions of “good” or “bad” microbes, this book presents a compelling vision for planetary coexistence―one that starts not with grand solutions but with small, rhythmic acts of microscopic attunement.

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Maya Hey is a postdoctoral researcher with the Environmental Humanities Laboratory at KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden and a core member of the Centre for the Social Study of Microbes at the University of Helsinki.