Singing with Invisible Worlds

Fermenting Sake on Microbial Time

Discount codes

To pre-order in the US, use discount code: MN95390 (valid until November 02, 2026)
To pre-order in Canada, use discount code: MNUTPF26 (valid until November 02, 2026)
To pre-order in Europe, Asia (except Japan), Africa and Middle East, use discount code: MNMNGF26 (valid until February 02, 2026)

Request a review copy on the publisher’s page (link to University of Minnesota Press)

About the book

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.

Praise

“Singing with Invisible Worlds rethinks human–microbe futures, deftly showing how the Terada Honke brewers use nonscalable and multitemporal sensory practices to live and work with microbial uncertainty. Part incantation, part parable, the fermentation techniques that Maya Hey describes offer a moving methodological ethics for living together in increasingly pressurized times.”

—Emily Yates-Doerr, author of Mal-Nutrition: Maternal Health Science and the Reproduction of Harm

“Microbes cause fermentation, but it’s the deliberate, syncopated work of skilled craftspeople controlling microbial environments that results in quality fermented foods. In this meticulous account, Maya Hey reveals sake brewing to be a choreographed yet improvisational gathering of microbes, a ritualistic yet playful summoning of transformative forces. The outcome vastly exceeds what can be served in a cup.”

—Heather Paxson, author of The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America

“You may not drink sake, and you may not dance, and you may not feel the beauty and playfulness of ongoingness – but read this book, and you might take up at least one of these shimmering practices. We are awash in microbes, thank goodness. As Maya Hey shows, since humans are necessarily entangled with microbes we also necessarily practice some form of relation with them, in time and space. Singing With Invisible Worlds offers a scintillating, grounded, and evocative model for practicing how we live, work, perceive, and dance with our co-constituting microbial kin and kinds.”

—Alexis Shotwell, author of Liberation Is Other People