52 pages • 1 hour read
Asha LemmieFifty Words for Rain
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Duty Versus Desire
Content Warning: This section of the guide depicts instances of colorism, racism, and related prejudices, as well as depicts physical abuse, sexual assault, and child trafficking.
The theme of duty versus desire is integral to the novel. The main characters in the novel all experience this conflict, though they respond to it differently.
Akira’s character arc is a prime example of this conflict. His dream is to become a professional musician and study music outside Japan. He is very talented, but his skill with the violin is not valued by his grandparents, who expect him to put his family first and focus on his duty as the Kamiza heir. In actuality, Akira does put his family first, if not in the way that his grandparents want him to—Akira prioritizes Nori above all, including over his personal ambitions regarding his music. Akira defends Nori from Yuko’s abuse and neglect, rescues her from the brothel, and ultimately sacrifices his youth and dream career to become Nori’s legal guardian and protect her from their grandparents. Also, he unintentionally sacrifices his life to accompany Nori during her first musical performance, which represents the extent of his love and affection for her.
Though Akira is torn between his duties and desires, he attempts to find balance for himself. He negotiates with Yuko to maintain some of his freedoms, such as traveling to Europe to study music before he comes of age. While he cares for Nori, he still leaves her alone to travel for his music, even arguing with her when she forbids this. In this way, Akira strikes a balance between duty and desire, so he never becomes bitter about his sacrifices; he ensures that he finds space for his personal happiness within his choices.
While Nori also struggles with this conflict, she tends to lean on the side of duty over her own wishes and happiness. From the beginning, she is taught to obey unquestioningly. Since her mother, Seiko, believes that she suffered greatly in life because she chose desire over duty, she tells young Nori, “Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist. Do not think if thinking will lead you somewhere you ought not to be. Only smile and do as you are told” (5). Nori takes this lesson to heart and does not resist her grandparents’ cruel treatment. Also, as an illegitimate biracial child, she has no bargaining power the way that Akira does. As a child, she has no choice but to obey—stay in the attic, bleach her skin, and quietly take beatings.
However, as Nori grows up, she begins to assert her desires within the confines of her powerlessness. For instance, while she accepts being sent to the brothel because she believes it is her duty to obey her grandmother’s decision, she nevertheless attempts suicide to express her desire to escape sexual assault. At the conclusion of the novel, Nori gives in to duty when she agrees to become the Kamiza heir, even at the price of her happiness. However, she also desires the power that comes with this title—she has been powerless for much of her life, so she wants this new responsibility. She also wants to change the ways of the Kamiza family when she is in charge, so her final decision is motivated by a combination of duty and desire.
Seiko is the only character in the novel who manages to thwart duty in favor of desire, but doing so comes at a price: She pays for her freedom in Paris with heartbreak; when she finds love with James, she is separated from Akira, whom she loves. The advice Seiko gives Nori before she abandons her is to toe the line and obey traditions, which shows that Seiko thinks that the suffering she experiences is too great to justify the pursuit of desire over duty.
Women’s Powerlessness in Patriarchal Societies
Fifty Words for Rain portrays the stark realities of patriarchal societies and their effects on women. All the women characters in the novel are impacted by the rules imposed on them by the men in their lives. While this is most obvious in the case of young and helpless characters, like Nori and Miyuki, the novel shows that even Yuko, who is seemingly powerful, is limited by the patriarchal society she lives in.
Yuko is the matriarch of the Kamiza clan, and she is rigid and ruthless in her attempts to hold on to her power in a conservative, patriarchal society. However, the novel shows that she is ruthless because she must be. Toward the end of the novel, when Nori asks her if she has any regrets, Yuko responds that she has “Many. And none” (445). What Yuko means is that she has a strong sense of duty, which convinces her that anything she does to ensure the bright future of the Kamiza clan is the right thing to do; this is why she has no regrets. However, several of Yuko’s actions make her uneasy despite this, which explains her many regrets. She must hide any tendency she has toward kindness, especially toward Nori. Her husband, Kohei, with his traditional, patriarchal views, is inclined to kill Nori for being illegitimate, but Yuko manages to keep Nori hidden away from his violence. Similarly, though Yuko sends Nori to the brothel because Yuko believes that it is the right course of action for the family, she nevertheless negotiates Nori’s protection from sexual slavery at least until she is 16. Yuko believes that she will go to hell for her role in the automobile accident that killed Akira, which shows her guilt about the incident; she also reveals that Kohei masterminded the plan. Also, while Yuko initially rejects Nori as a descendent, in the end, she acknowledges her as the family heir, despite having other distant male heirs to choose from in Akira’s absence. This might not have been a decision she would have made if Kohei were still alive. In this way, the novel shows that Yuko’s power is hard-won; to hold onto it, she must operate within the rules of the patriarchal society she lives in.
In contrast to Yuko, Nori has no power at all at the beginning of the novel since she is a child. She embodies the limited agency that women have in patriarchal societies. She doesn’t protest the discrimination and harsh, abusive treatment she receives at her grandparents’ estate, and she constantly and obediently seeks her elders’ approval. She internalizes their views that she is cursed and brings bad luck because she was born outside of marriage and is biracial, though this is not through any action of her own. Although she gradually learns to voice her desires as she grows older, she continues to defer to the men in her life. She puts Akira’s needs before her own; for instance, she agrees to Akira studying music abroad despite being terrified of being left alone in the house with Will. Likewise, she “tolerates” Will’s unwanted advances and periodic sexual assaults because she doesn’t want to destroy Akira’s friendship with Will.
While many of the female characters in the novel struggle because of patriarchal ideas in traditional Japanese society of the time, the novel shows that these ideas are not confined to Japan; they affect the lives of other women, too, like Alice, who is British. Alice has a sexual relationship with a servant as a teenager, and she escapes to Japan to run away from the scandal. In London, just as in Japan, women have no sexual freedom; Alice is shamed for her actions, just as Seiko is disgraced in Japan when she has a relationship with James. Moreover, Alice becomes financially dependent on her cousin Will as a result of this, showing how women of the time had no financial freedom and had to obey patriarchal rules just to ensure their livelihood. Alice and Seiko’s stories show that for women in patriarchal societies, adherence to social expectations often comes at the cost of personal happiness.
The Complexities of Ethnicity and Class
A key component of the novel is Nori’s ethnicity and class, which differentiates her from the rest of her Japanese family. Nori is biracial; she is born to a Japanese mother and a Black father. She is of two different social classes, as well, since her mother comes from Japanese nobility and her father is from a farming family in Virginia. This combination often leaves Nori in a liminal space in the novel, giving her a unique perspective and worldview. Although she is culturally Japanese, she is often not fully accepted as being Japanese because of her darker skin and curly hair, which is a legacy from a father and culture that she never knew. Her grandparents are ashamed of her illegitimacy and biracial heritage, so they hide her away in the attic as a child and bathe her in bleach in an attempt to lighten her skin. Despite enduring these cruelties without complaint, Nori is punished because she is not “Japanese enough,” even though she knows no other way to be. She is, she discovers later, essentially stateless: She doesn’t have an official birth certificate, so she can neither prove her Japanese heritage nor apply for US citizenship. When she returns to Japan as an adult, she feels like a foreigner and is treated as such by her taxi driver; ironically, it is only then that Yuko accepts her as her heir.
Nori traverses social classes as well—while she is educated as a noble, she spends most of her time with servants. Her caregiver at her grandparents’ estate, Akiko, is a servant who is a maternal figure to Nori. However, when Nori is sold to a brothel, she is separated from the other commoner girls who work there by dint of her lineage. This is the first time that Nori experiences the benefits of being from the upper class. She isn’t immediately sold into sexual slavery at the brothel like the other girls are; instead, she is only required to play music for the male clientele. When Yuko exiles Nori from Japan, Nori once again drifts through a liminal space between social classes: She is rich but lives frugally, and she falls in love with Noah, who is a commoner. Since Nori hasn’t been accepted by Japanese aristocracy, this gives her the freedom to break the rules of her social class. However, when Yuko pulls her back to her Japanese royal family, Nori loses this freedom and must observe class rules, which is why she breaks off her engagement with Noah.
In contrast to Nori’s fluidity between the classes, other characters in the novel are much more rigid in their social hierarchies. The Kamizas never question their aristocracy and luxurious lifestyle: Yuko and Kohei are proud of their family’s royal bloodline and will go to any extent to preserve it; and even when money becomes an issue, Akira is reluctant to give up his comfortable, privileged life. Likewise, Will and Alice also maintain their British noble status. Will receives all the privileges that his ethnicity and class afford him. While Alice is more sympathetic and flexible, she nevertheless decides to return to the familiarity of aristocratic British society by marrying well; she spends years in disgrace in Japan after falling in love with a servant in London, and she realizes that a life of rebellion is too uncomfortable for her.
Also, while Nori has the privilege of social mobility because of her birth into aristocracy, the characters in the novel who are from the lower classes do not ever have the freedom to rise above their class. For instance, regardless of the maternal feelings Akiko harbors for Nori, she will only ever be a servant in the Kamiza household, even when Nori returns as heiress. Similarly, though Akira’s servant Ayame is in love with him, she can never even think that he might reciprocate her love because of the difference in their social stations. Her grief for his death can only ever be expressed in private.
