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.
Part 2Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2, Chapter 7 Summary: “Exile”
It is autumn of 1951, and Akira is furious when he learns that Yuko has sent Nori away to a brothel. Yuko refuses to tell him Nori’s location. Akiko doesn’t know where Nori is, either.
Yuko sold Nori to a brothel connected to the Kamizas. Kiyomi, one of the strangers who took Nori from the estate, is in charge of running the business and training the girls. Kiyomi wishes that she felt no sympathy for Nori, but she does. When she tells Nori that her grandmother sold her to them, Nori is impassive; she says she will obey the rules and do what Kiyomi asks. Nori doesn’t know that her grandfather owns the establishment. Due to Nori’s relatively privileged upbringing, she is given special status—she doesn’t have to sleep with the clients. She is purely an entertainer and plays the violin for the men who come to the brothel.
Kiyomi meets with Nori regularly to educate her in the skills she will need at the brothel. Nori studies poetry and practices tea ceremonies. In her free time, she seeks solace in the garden by the brothel; here, she meets Miyuki, another girl from the brothel, and the two become fast friends. Nori teaches Miyuki how to read and write. One night, Miyuki tells Nori that she doesn’t think Nori is pretty. Miyuki is jealous of the attention Nori gets. Nori replies she is only a “pig being fattened for slaughter, nothing more” (152).
Part 2, Chapter 8 Summary: “Tree Song”
When Nori turns 13, in September 1953, Kiyomi’s boss visits the brothel. He announces that Nori has a prospective patron; the following month, men will come for a “private viewing.” He says a gentleman wants to take her traveling with him. Kiyomi is angry, as Nori isn’t supposed to be sold until she is 16. Kiyomi has grown to care about her and doesn’t want to part with her. However, the man is firm; the sale will proceed as planned. Kiyomi tries to prepare Nori for what will come next, but Nori is unwilling to listen to her; she intends to kill herself rather than become enslaved. Kiyomi tries to dissuade her from this plan, but Nori is determined. During Nori’s auction, Miyuki begs Kiyomi to save Nori, but Kiyomi can do nothing. On the night before the sale, Nori is calm. She thinks that “[her] life had meant nothing; her death would mean nothing” (167). Afterward, Nori gives Miyuki her pearl necklace to finance Miyuki’s reunion with her sister. It is their final farewell.
Part 2, Chapter 9 Summary: “Impasse”
The following month, Kiyomi accompanies Nori to her new lodgings in Tokyo. In the car, Nori contemplates her impending demise; she has hidden a knife in her clothes and plans to kill herself with it. She thinks of Akira and her affection for him. Kiyomi again begs her to live; she apologizes for all that Nori has suffered under her care. Nori ignores her, resigned to the worst.
The car brings them to the royal ward of the city, and Kiyomi leaves her. When Nori is alone in a room, she cuts her thigh, aiming to sever the artery. As she loses consciousness, Akira finds her and panics.
Part 2, Chapter 10 Summary: “Sonata”
Nori drifts in a haze. When she wakes, Akira is beside her. He tells her that he spent the last two years searching for her. He hired someone to pose as a buyer to get her away from the brothel. Their grandparents said they would hurt Nori if he kept trying to get her back. By rescuing her, Akira has “declare[d] war” on their grandparents. Now, Akira and Nori’s choices are limited: Nori has no birth certificate or citizenship papers, so they can’t leave Japan. Akira decides to sacrifice his future as the Kamiza heir to negotiate with their grandparents for her protection; Akira believes that Yuko’s spies already know where they are. Nori cries, devastated, believing she is cursed. She worries that she has ruined Akira’s life.
Part 2, Chapter 11 Summary: “Fear No Evil”
A month later, Nori is at Akira’s house and is once again housebound, but this time it is for her protection. She spends her time practicing the violin and caring for the garden. Ayame, Akira’s trusted servant since childhood, cares for her. Akira acquires forged paperwork for Nori so she can leave the country in an emergency. Once the meeting with their grandparents has been set, there is a temporary and uneasy peace between the family members. Akira says that the only power Yuko has over Nori is that Nori is a secret; if Nori has legal documents, then the law can offer her more protection. He plans to make this case at the courts.
Akira takes Nori to a festival. As he watches her enjoy the sights, he realizes that Nori teaches him patience. Her exuberance is the opposite of his perfectionism. As Akira observes her, he reflects on his own past. He remembers his father dying of cancer; he recalls his mother’s liveliness and playfulness. Akira was not surprised to learn about Seiko’s adultery—she always wanted more adventure than his father could give her. Akira now realizes that he cares deeply about Nori but is afraid of losing her.
On the day that Akira is to meet their grandparents, Nori begs to join Akira. Akira initially refuses but gives in. At the meeting, Yuko drives a hard bargain. She says that Akira is free to do as he pleases until the age of 21, at which point he must return to Kyoto every summer to learn the family business. When he turns 25, he will marry a woman chosen by Yuko but will remain in Tokyo. Nori is a point of contention: Their grandparents want her to leave Japan and live in exile; Akira insists on keeping her with him and sending her to school. Yuko and Kohei are furious, more so when Akira declares his intentions to change the Kamiza family’s attitudes when he inherits his title. Kohei tells Nori that she is nothing. Nori puts her arms around Akira and says, “I am your granddaughter. […] I am your family. You cannot erase me. Even if you kill me, I existed” (212). Enraged, Kohei attacks Nori and tries to strangle her, but he is subdued by Akira. As their grandparents are ejected from the room, Akira considers this battle a temporary victory.
Part 2, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Only Thing Immortal”
It is December of 1953, and Nori slowly heals from Kohei’s attack. Her neck is bruised and the blood vessels in her eyes are ruptured. Akira becomes distant and uneasy around her. Later, he tells Nori that he blames himself for her injuries and that he shouldn’t have let her come to the meeting. He tells her that she must obey him from now on.
As a result of the negotiations with their grandparents, Akira will no longer receive an allowance, and his inheritance will barely last for two more years. To save money, he lays off most of his servants. Nori begins cooking and doing chores around the house. Akira resumes his musical studies; however, Nori cannot go to school because they worry that she won’t be safe in public. So, Akira decides to tutor her at home and resume her violin lessons.
Nori’s nightmares haunt her, so she avoids sleeping. She spends her nights in the garden, among the trees she loves. Akira finds her one morning and tells her that he is traveling to Paris for a music competition. Though Nori is upset and anxious, she knows she can’t stop him from leaving; so, she pretends she supports him wholeheartedly. Her mother’s abandonment haunts her dreams; when she wakes, Ayame offers to tell Nori about her mother.
Part 2 Analysis
As Nori enters her teen years in Part 2 of the novel, the theme of Women’s Powerlessness in Patriarchal Societies takes center stage. Previously, Nori was cruelly mistreated at the Kamiza estate, but she realizes that she had some autonomy there when compared to her life of captivity at the brothel. Nori’s sheltered lifestyle is indelibly altered here, and she must face the reality of what life is like for her companions at the brothel: Often destitute, they are locked into their contracts and depend on men for their salary and survival, even though the women are knowingly exploited by the men. Kiyomi, the proprietor of the brothel, has fought her way to the top from the very bottom of the social hierarchy, and she is determined to survive no matter what. However, she finds that her cynical business acumen has left her with no self-respect and a very reluctant sense of empathy; she feels she can’t care about the girls in her charge if she wants to protect herself. In contrast, Nori’s friend Miyuki knows she doesn’t have much of a future at the brothel since she is deemed undesirable—she is plump and is not a classic beauty. Nevertheless, she enters the brothel willingly to provide for her sisters, whom she loves. Miyuki’s case shows the limited options available to women of the time and place for financial independence.
Ironically, the brothel is the first place where people value Nori’s talents, personality, and beauty. However, her abilities are mere commodities in the business of pleasing men. When Nori describes herself as a “pig being fattened for slaughter” (152), she acknowledges that she is just a way for other people to use her to earn money—she has no choice in the matter and must perform when expected. When Kiyomi trains Nori to behave appropriately in the company of men, Kiyomi describes everything that a woman does as an art. Women’s behavior—at least their behavior in the presence of men—involves cultivated artifice or silence. They must not express their honest opinions because their opinions are not valued; even if they do speak their minds, they are not taken seriously. The artifice of the brothel is a microcosm of the society in which Nori finds herself, in which women are expected to serve and flatter the men around them. When Nori plays the violin for the men at the brothel, her music is only for their pleasure. In contrast, Akira performs music because it elevates him and fuels his ambitions.
As Nori understands society’s expectations of women, she comes to fear womanhood itself. When Kiyomi educates Nori about the realities of her new life as a sex worker, Nori rejects womanhood entirely, saying, “I don’t think I want to be a woman;” and Kiyomi’s response to this statement is that “Someone has to do it” (144). Kiyomi, too, is making the best of a bad situation at the brothel. Though she has more power than her charges, running the brothel is not a job that gives her any pleasure. Kiyomi acknowledges that their gender is a disadvantage in the patriarchal society of the time, and her advice to Nori is to try her best to survive it.
This section of the novel also shows how The Complexities of Ethnicity and Class intersect with the position of women. Though Nori’s skin tone will always mark her as different, it is her class that comes to the fore in this section. Though Nori is not privileged within Japanese upper-crust society because of her ethnicity, her education and social standing lend her privilege at the brothel. This is why she isn’t immediately forced into sexual slavery like the poorer girls working at the brothel; Nori’s class grants her extra freedom to wander the grounds as she pleases, eat what she likes, and entertain the men with her violin rather than her body. In contrast, Miyuki’s diet is restricted because Kiyomi thinks she is fat, and other girls at the brothel fight over the male patrons’ favor and the trinkets they give the girls. Still, Nori’s class privileges mean nothing when the men who run the brothel decide to buy and sell Nori, interweaving the disadvantages of her gender into her already precarious social standing.
