Get ready to have your heart broken in a World War 2 era masterpiece of historical fiction (September 2020)
“Do not question, do not fight. Do not resist. Only your life is more important than your obedience. Only the air you breathe.”
These heartbreaking words mark the start of Asha Lemmie’s 50 Words for Rain, a novel that tells the story of a girl named Noriko Kamiza during the years after World War 2 in Kyoto, Japan. Noriko—nicknamed Nori—should be a well-loved princess, yet at the mere age of 8, her mother abandons her at the door of her maternal grandparents’ estate in Kyoto with nothing but a single promise: to obey.
But in her grandparents’ eyes, being the illegitimate daughter of a Japanese noble-woman and an African-American soldier makes Nori a disgrace, and Lemmie’s novel follows Nori as she struggles to reconcile with her oppression: from being subjected to bleach-baths and abuse, to being sold to a brothel, to being forced to leave Japan.
Told primarily from Nori’s perspective, 50 Words for Rain is devastating and thought-provoking. Lemmie’s beautiful writing is a highlight of the book. Her sentences are at once lush with literary devices and carefully reflective of themes in the book. What I appreciated the most was her accurate mirroring of Nori’s age—Lemmie is able to draw the reader into the mind of both an 8 year-old and a 20 year-old, a feat that many other books are unable to pull. Additionally, Nori’s progression into a young woman feels realistic. Her abuse and oppression are not treated as a backdrop; rather, they are something that Nori struggles to cope with her entire life, and we get to see both Nori’s moments of defiance and her moments of total despair.
For its entirety, the book is a tragic page-turner. Lemmie perfectly encapsulates the painful reality of Nori’s life and truly makes you feel for Nori: you can’t help but smile when she falls in love, and your heart shatters when her’s does.
Yet while I felt closely-connected with Nori’s perspective, I was confused at some of the other voices Lemmie wove into the novel. The other characters’ narratives were only threaded into the story once or twice, which felt random and, quite frankly, annoying. Although the other characters sometimes had interesting insights about Nori’s life that were necessary to the plot, at other times the additional perspectives transported the reader into an entirely different struggle that distracted from Nori’s story.
Lastly, the ending of the novel felt a bit frustrating. While we get to know more about Nori’s mother throughout the novel, we never get the answer to the question that haunts Nori throughout her life: why her mother abandoned her. Lemmie doesn’t tie the story into a bow, instead leaving the threads of the novel largely hanging up for interpretation. While this seemed like an understandable ending to a story as difficult as Nori’s, it also felt like a step backward from the character progression the later chapters of the book build.
All in all, however, Lemmie’s 50 Words for Rain is a moving work of historical fiction that is thought-provoking until the last word. It challenged my ideas about identity, power, and acceptance, posing the question of what does it really mean to be free?
I highly recommend it!
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