11.1 All Travail is Worth the Effort in the End
Part Two: Sumire
The Education of Sumire Min is a previously unpublished novel by S. Jae-Jones. Chapters will be emailed every Friday at 5PM EST. If you do not wish to receive the next chapter, but want to remain subscribed for other updates, you may unsubscribe from the book here.
This chapter is uh, really, really long, so it’s been broken up into two relevant parts.
Once acknowledged, a secret is hard to keep. And secrets, like snowflakes in winter storm, tend to build upon one another until the weight of myriads becomes enough to collapse a foundation.
Sumire was privy to many secrets: the cost of infatuation, the price of virginity, the relative worth of beauty. She knew the numbers and tallies that marked the exact value of womanhood, written in ink in narrow columns in accounting books. This was the currency with which she learned to barter in the Morita okiya.
But she was aware of so many more things, so many more secrets beyond the flower and willow world, beyond the teahouses of Gion and into the chambers of state of the political sphere. She knew of the growing tensions between the Count and his rival Minister Aoki, of the echoing discontent between their supporting factions, and of the increasing ideological divide that existed between them. She knew, and said nothing, because secrets that aren’t your own are the easiest to bear.