14. Honne and Tatemae
Part Two: Sumire
The Education of Sumire Min is a previously unpublished novel by S. Jae-Jones. Chapters will be emailed to paying subscribers every Friday at 5PM EST. If you are not yet a subscriber and would like to read the rest of the book, as well as receive all sorts of behind-the-scenes access—including a Discord server—why not give it a try?
As a young woman, Sumire never did have much patience for novels, poetry, or other forms of literature. To wallow in feelings, to elevate suffering, to beautify emotions seemed indulgent and pointless, and the time spent on analyzing and contemplating texts from eras and dynasties bygone, dead, and Q’inese was, in her opinion, useless. Her pragmatic mind could not comprehend art without utility, and was therefore unable to appreciate or empathize with the sentiment found in books.
Growing up in the okiya, Sumire and the other shikomi training to make their debuts had little time for reading outside the realm of study, but the occasional novel—cheaply bound paperbacks with tattered pages—made the rounds at school. The girls giggled and sighed over the stories of Izumi Kyoka, ridiculous fancies of supernatural demons and high romance, but the novels the girls loved more than any other involved heroes and heroines in everyday domestic settings, stoically agonizing over the conflict between their inner desires and their duty to society, honne and tatemae. As a sensible girl of 14, Sumire found such stories sophomoric and self-indulgent.
As a mature young lady of 18, she was no longer so sure of her earlier convictions.
She had always thought of the conflict between honne and tatemae as being somewhat overstated, particularly within the heightened landscape of a novel, where the stakes always seemed to be life, death, or worse, the loss of honor. There was often a forbidden love affair, forbidden because the beloved was of the wrong class, the wrong clan, the wrong name, the resolution and redemption of which could only result in death, for it was the only way to end with dignity. Sumire’s reputation for emotional frigidity began within the pages of these books, with her lack of compassion for the misery of its suffering characters.
“Oh Sumire-san,” the girls would say, “how could you be so hard-hearted?”
“Because it is not real,” she would reply. “Because it has no use.”
“But it is real,” they would return. “I read in their suffering an echo of my own.”
Sumire wondered what unfulfilled desires a foolish young girl could possess that she wouldn't eventually grow out of or put aside in favor of more womanly duties. It seemed futile to sigh and pine over what couldn't be, and so the honne/tatemae divide never seemed to apply to Sumire. As she grew older, she managed to make her inner desires manifest within the paradigm of what was socially acceptable, and therefore believed that unfulfilled desires were simply those unworthy of being fulfilled.
But that was before she understood that some desires were too deep to be fulfilled.