Title: Fifty Words for Rain Author: Asha Lemmie
Published: September 22, 2020
Genre(s): Historical Fiction
Page Count: 464
Rating:
Summary from Goodreads:Kyoto, Japan, 1948. "If a woman knows nothing else, she should know how to be silent. . . . Do not question. Do not fight. Do not resist." Such is eight-year-old Noriko "Nori" Kamiza's first lesson. She will not question why her mother abandoned her with only these final words. She will not fight her confinement to the attic of her grandparents' imperial estate. And she will not resist the scalding chemical baths she receives daily to lighten her shameful skin.
The illegitimate child of a Japanese aristocrat and her African American GI lover, Nori is an outsider from birth. Though her grandparents take her in, they do so only to conceal her, fearful of a stain on the royal pedigree that they are desperate to uphold in a changing Japan. Obedient to a fault, Nori accepts her solitary life for what it is, despite her natural intellect and nagging curiosity about what lies outside the attic's walls. But when chance brings her legitimate older half-brother, Akira, to the estate that is his inheritance and destiny, Nori finds in him the first person who will allow her to question, and the siblings form an unlikely but powerful bond—a bond their formidable grandparents cannot allow and that will irrevocably change the lives they were always meant to lead. Because now that Nori has glimpsed a world in which perhaps there is a place for her after all, she is ready to fight to be a part of it—a battle that just might cost her everything.
Too often, people mistakenly believe that the analysis for “how many terrible things befall a protagonist?” is one and the same as “how much merit does this book have?” The more tragic the circumstances, the more “literary” the novel must be. There is beauty in suffering, many believe—especially if the sufferer is a woman. Because a corollary to this misconception is this: a woman’s tragic life is a stand-in for her own character growth. Women are forged by adversity, etc.
Fifty Words for Rain is a beautiful, wonderfully written novel. It is also 100% unabashed tragedy porn. It is nearly 500 pages of watching protagonist Nori suffer through every loss, torture, and deprivation imaginable—beatings, confinement, chemical “skin whitening treatments,” slavery, rape, loss of family members, grief, near-death experiences, racism, xenophobia. You name it, Lemmie probably puts her character through it.
It is so beautifully told, this morbid story of a young girl’s ceaselessly calamitous life. So many critics have praised the author’s prose and the “plot twists” (which are not surprising once you come to understand this book feeds on morbid disasters). I wonder, though, if any have looked beneath the surface and really seen that this is a shocking book built on a nonexistent character arc and some questionable portrayals of a culture the author has no first-hand experience with.
This book is set in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s. Asha Lemmie is not Japanese, though I completely credit that she loves and respects the culture. Yet I wonder if she has the range. Is this depiction of Japan appropriate, or does it feed into our Western stereotypes? For instance: at one point, Nori is sold as a slave to a whorehouse/geisha house. This felt gratuitous and sensationalized. I am not Japanese, so I cannot speak here, but I wonder why Lemmie, a Black American woman, felt qualified to write a story of a Black Japanese woman suffering on account of her identity—and if she considered the consequences of portraying Japan as a country full of immoral racists.
More concerning to me is the protagonist, Nori, and her development over the course of Fifty Words for Rain. The first 70% of the novel is merely Nori suffering at the whims of those around her—not least her elder half-brother, Akira, for whom she has a near-incestuous love and obsession for, though it is not returned: he treats her horribly up until the night he dies; obviously, any love and tenderness for Nori must quickly be gotten rid of. Lemmie inflicts loss after loss upon Nori, in such a way that the sequence of events seems clearly manufactured and baseless. Throughout the text, Nori’s defining characteristics are her blind love for her brother and her ability to “rise up” from yet another tragedy. This is not character growth; this is not a personality.
And then the end…oh boy, the end. In summary: Nori abandons her fiancé and newborn son in order to take over her family’s corrupt, semi-legal business empire in Kyoto; she agrees to marry a Japanese nobleman and become the ideal model of womanhood, all at the behest of her horrible grandmother (who attempted to kill her multiple times, sold her into slavery, and was complicit in the murder of her beloved half-brother). I hated it, because it just seemed more evidence that Lemmie valued her protagonist’s suffering over any kind of catharsis. Is Nori going to be happy in her role as Japanese crime-boss? Nope! Not at all—the book makes it clear she will be miserable. So what is this? Lemmie truly expects to put her character through a lifetime’s worth of adversity, have her escape and find a happy future…only to have Nori willingly choose to revictimize herself yet again?
Make it make sense!
The only way this works is if we accept that Nori’s entire personality is her obsession with her brother and if we find this to be admirable rather than pathetic. By assuming the role of head of the family, she is doing what Akira cannot do, since he was murdered for being close to her. I mean…fine. If you think having the main character of your book make self-desctructive choices out of grief and guilt is a sign of Deep Complexity and Character Growth, then I don’t know what to tell you. Wear it if you want to.
The frustrating thing about all of this is that Fifty Words for Rain is actually quite good! Lemmie’s writing is evocative, and her flair for tragedy is complemented well by her perfect timing and grasp of emotion. The first 70% of the novel is a tragedy fest, but you have hope throughout that Nori’s life will change for the better. I truly cannot express how much I enjoyed the vast majority of this book (though, again: would love to have some Japanese readers weigh in on this depiction of post-war Japan). The end obviously yanks the rug out from under readers in a way that is designed to be shocking rather than sensical, and that’s where I was lost. Up until then: it was great!
Look, if you’re in the market for a story about Sad Events that’s going to make you Feel Things, Fifty Words for Rain is probably the best you can do. I know a lot of readers love to read tragedy porn (*cough* A Little Life *cough*). However, I question if this was tragedy for a good and transformative purpose, or tragedy for the sake of tragedy. I’m inclined to think the latter.
