The Education of Sumire Min is a previously unpublished novel by S. Jae-Jones.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?
🚨 content warning: pregnancy resulting from sexual assault, mentions of marital rape, abortion, miscarriage bodily autonomy and the lack thereof 🚨
Some wounds, Sumire thought, did not heal.
He had broken her. He had broken something loose, and now her body and innards roiled and shifted and rejected everything. She had become a stranger inside her own body. Each morning she awoke—unmoored, undone, and unsure—and stared at her naked form in the mirror, wondering if those were truly her breasts, her stomach, her thighs. Everything seemed different somehow: her nipples darker, her belly softer, her hips broader. Or perhaps she had always been this way.
There was something terrible, raw, open, and putrid within her, and she must keep quiet, must keep still, must keep meek lest that hole swallow her up. Sumire was crouched within herself, hiding lest the Nipponese demon return, lest the prince find her again. He was still in Heian, the demon prince, still there with his delegation, still working through the finer points of the execution of their international treaty, although in truth, Sumire wasn't sure if the prince was a part of these talks, or if he was playing truant with another sweet, young thing all over the city. She found she did not care. She probed at the thought of him with another young woman, gingerly, like tonguing a toothache, and found that the idea caused her no pain, no jealousy. In another life she might have been. But that was before he broke her.
In another life she had been foolish, naive, ignorant, and idealistic. Sumire both envied and hated the girl she had been—envied her for her optimism, hated her for her stupidity. She had gone through the world believing that nothing and no one could touch her, and her knowledge of cost had been nothing but idle credit. She hated how she had delivered her innocence straight into the hands of men, men whose control she had sought to escape ever since she was a little girl. She hated them, hated the Count, the Minister, the prince, the demon, and sometimes even Corliss—but she hated them because the alternative was to hate herself.
She wanted Mother. A mother, a woman whose hands were soft and undemanding and loving, someone who would turn her back into a babe and cradle her in warm, safe, female arms. Sumire did not have a mother. She had a biological dame and a schoolmistress, and neither were available to her. She longed to crawl back to the okiya gates just as she had as a child, newly christened and lost in a foreign country, and be welcomed into its cool, dark, feminine grotto again. She had suffered for weeks, denied a female presence, denied a female touch, alone and ill and curled into a tight ball of grief, hurt, and anger.
Some wounds never healed. Some festered and grew and developed into something beyond control. And soon, Sumire would come to discover that some developed lives of their own.