Seigi’s Queer Coming of Age
(Author’s Note: This post is over 2,300 words long according to Microsoft Word. There is no “read more” link. If you do not want to read this many words of me rambling about Seigi’s queerness please just hit “J” now. You will be scrolling for a while.
Author’s Note The Second: This was written up for @riku7se‘s birthday today. Happy birthday!)
The Case Files of Jeweler Richard is a story about a lot of things, but first and foremost, it is Seigi’s story. Seigi’s story of self-discovery, acceptance of the man he discovered, and becoming an adult. A story of him discovering the world and discovering himself inside that world.
And it’s a very queer story.
Seigi begins the series not knowing any queer people (that he’s aware of) and not knowing pretty much anything about queerness as a concept. He mentions seeing parades—he knows it exists. But he also says he thought every queer person knew what they were and were actively proud of who they were. Seigi was both unaware of and certainly not proud of anything like that.
But then, don’t most queer people start that way?
Seigi met Richard and understood nothing except that Richard was beautiful, and that his feelings for Richard were akin to that of the attraction in a romance novel.
What did he do with that? Immediate denial.
Well, that doesn’t make him less queer. He still had no idea what was what, still hadn’t had an exposure to queerness. At least he didn’t pretend Richard wasn’t attractive.
He met Tanimoto shortly after he met Richard, another lovely gemology geek, and any attraction he had to Richard was immediately reassigned to her. Sure, Richard was beautiful, he’d never deny that, but that didn’t mean anything, did it? He was in love with Tanimoto, after all. His kinship to her was heteronormative (or at least it could appear that way). As long as he was in love with Tanimoto, he obviously couldn’t be attracted to Richard…right? And she wasn’t available—he didn’t have to deal with his feelings or attractions at all.
But Richard wasn’t even the first man Seigi considered building a life with! By the time he was in middle school, he was already thinking of being a man’s “housewife,” although he certainly didn’t think of it in terms of attraction. He wanted to bake and clean and take care of someone (take care of…a man). He liked pink (and orange) instead of blue, and his mother ignored this preference and bought him blue anyway. He was mocked by his classmates for his gender non-conformities they didn’t understand the same way he was teased for his sense of justice and protecting people.
He just also never understood how that might be queer.
By the time we hear about Hase in volume two, Richard has notice something a bit…well, not heteronormative about Seigi, but Seigi still has yet to notice anything at all. He’s gone so long without having to confront it that simply having the feelings won’t push him.
Then he has his dreams of Richard kissing him (or, well, close enough). And as confused and clueless as Seigi can be, he’s not that clueless. But he still wasn’t up to dealing with it, not until he had to or lose Richard completely: when Saul demanded an answer to it before he would tell Seigi anyway.
Saul questioned Seigi’s feelings in Richard’s castle where he protects everyone from judgment and prejudice. Forced him to find an answer, a real answer, if he wanted to chase Richard down. And after Richard’s story about his ex, Seigi comes to a conclusion: if Richard, someone he admires so much, as a man, as a good man he’d like to be like, could be queer: maybe it’s okay if he is? Maybe he is, too? Maybe, just maybe, his admiration is something more profound than admiration for an employer?
He questions over and over if his feelings are love. If that’s the right word. If there is a word. If he has to have a word. If his feelings truly are so different from what he always thought they were. The words he says to himself that still haunt me are
“Is this love? Does this count?”
Is this love, even though it’s not heterosexual love for a woman from a man? Does it count, can it still be love, even when Seigi’s feelings haven’t been vetted by society and approved? Is it okay to feel the way he does? Can his feelings, someone who barely knows what he’s feeling or talking about, count as something like that? Can he feel something so profound without even knowing?
But even when he says, yeah, this is definitely love, this is definitely something important, he doesn’t decide that what kind of love it is. Is it romantic? He still doesn’t know. And to him, it doesn’t matter. His dreams of something with Richard are the beginning of his questioning, not the end. Everything before that was him reacting with frustration to people’s assumptions about him that he still hadn’t come to agree with. They saw something in him that he didn’t see, and it frustrated him.
It takes a long time to understand, learn, and unpack feelings to see that they don’t align with what society has prescribed, especially after you’ve spent decades twisting yourself into something acceptable for it.
After London—after Seigi has accepted something deep and profound about his affection for Richard, if not that they’re necessarily something queer, his college shifts to focus on career plans and life plans. Shimomura, the only person who ever understood his feelings around Richard even a little, who understood even without words, non-heteronormative attraction to something—realizes he doesn’t fit into society’s plan for him either and rejects it by flying off to Spain and starting his life completely over somewhere that Japan’s social structures no longer had any bearing on him.
Seigi learns more about Richard and his own lifetime or struggles. He learns more about the world. He learns more about love and the shapes it can take, and he learns more about queerness and partnerships, and has to put his hopes for Tanimoto to spare him from a queer existence to rest. While Seigi might not have completely given up on a woman entirely, he’s certainly thinking of Richard in that role—a rich woman of peerless beauty, Seigi? There is only one person you think is of peerless beauty, and it’s a man, and he’s right there next to you.
And with the way the series discusses beauty as not just a physical thing, but a choice to see something, a choice made of love and affection and determination, a belief in someone and something, Seigi seeing Richard as beautiful means his feelings for Richard are…well…peerless.
Richard is his angel walking along the streets with his wings on display: attracting everyone’s attention, fitting in nowhere, but touchable and close and part of Seigi’s world the way Tanimoto, flying high and alone, never can be.
(Sometimes, I can’t believe Seigi really said that).
And then, just as Seigi is really starting to come into his own, it’s all threatened by a biological family member who never knew or loved him properly, not as who he is, started demanding things from him and a relationship from him that Seigi not only couldn’t provide—he straight up refused to.
Sound familiar to anyone?
Seigi’s bio-father found him through a few careless comments on social media—something Seigi has always been quite careful about. When Jeffrey made a comment about his family choosing love (and wow, what a statement), he immediately deleted all photos of Seigi at request without a fuss. And knowing Jeffrey’s own gayness, I can see how he would completely understand why Seigi would want to keep things locked down and private.
Seigi’s trauma is that of a domestic abuse survivor who’s terrified of himself, but he is a man who is terrified of romance, of love, of partnership, of finding someone he truly cares for, because his feelings will mean he ends up hurting them irrecoverably. It’s one of the queerest narratives out there. Usually it’s vampires or something, but Seigi’s feelings fit here, too. He cares about Richard too much, and he’s terrified of those feelings for himself, what they mean he’ll become, and what they might do to taint Richard if he voices them. So he does his best…not to.
Richard, thankfully, has none of that nonsense and helps Seigi work through it, but it’s a trauma Seigi still deals with even years later. It’s not something he just magically gets over. He needs time to acclimate to the fact that his feelings are okay and they’re not going to hurt anyone.
And then Seigi is off to Sri Lanka, thanks to Richard rescuing him, and he can bake and housekeep in peace and wear sarongs instead of pants all he likes. A place where he’s so alone he has no choice but to learn about himself.
When Seigi picks up social media this time, it’s under a pseudonym and the only person he knows in real life who announced himself is someone he personally invited to see it. Someone he knew would understand and trusts: Shimomura, who has in the years since only stayed dancing to his own weird little tune.
The only friends Seigi keeps in close contact with after college are Tanimoto and Shimomura: people who have as little interest in a “normal” life as Seigi does, and who simply have already been more able to admit it. Having them in his life, as inspired by him as they claim to be, also helps him figure out who he is and that’s it’s okay to just be…weird.
And boy, does Seigi get a little weird. The books after the time skip are full of travel, full of exposure to people who don’t approve him and don’t approve of his relationship with Richard. And enough distance from Richard that it’s impossible to deny how badly he wants Richard in his life.
Once again, Richard’s relationship with Seigi is put in danger (this time by someone who wants him to marry someone else), and Seigi is forced to reckon with the fact that…he doesn’t want it to change. Not like that. What Seigi wants is to have a very clingy, exclusive relationship with Richard—and the idea of Richard having any of that with someone else, the idea of Richard sacrificing any of that to someone else, brings him to tears. Brings him back to realizing how much Richard means to him, how jealous he is of the idea of Richard marrying someone else.
Jealous enough to ask Richard out. A thoughtless question motivated not by having fully sorted through his feelings, but just pure want for Richard and to be with Richard. He rushes himself because he feels he doesn’t have time not to. He’s still not ready. He still doesn’t understand what it is he wants. But he’s now willing to clumsily pursue his own wants, at least.
Richard responds to that question, interestingly enough, not by saying yes, but by going into a long speech about how they choose partners, and how it’s not the way most people do, or the way society would expect them to. That neither of them choose partners based on practical concerns, but of what their heart wants most. And how that can get them both into trouble.
Especially if what their heart wants most isn’t something society wants to let them have.
Seigi was always a reasonably popular kid, at least in college—he had a lot of friends, if not close ones. Enough to go out drinking, enough to tell about Richard and promptly be teased for it because he sounded like he was describing a lovely new girlfriend and not his grumpy British boss. But by the time he’s spent a few years at Étranger and in therapy, seeing the world and everything it contains, he doesn’t fit with them anymore. He has changed too much and become too much a part of a foreign world to them, and they can’t understand him. He doesn’t belong to their world anymore, or their understanding of relationships.
In fact, they make fun of him. And Seigi didn’t quite expect it, then but by “Operaphile,” he knows. He fears it, and that’s why he wants to keep something so special and precious to him, something important to him, away from prying, judging eyes who won’t understand and will think it wrong of him to like something like opera (or…men). But one day, he will be strong enough, brave enough, to show who that is to the world.
And he gets the chance to start.
Seigi is included in the small family gathering of Richard’s uncle’s funeral—there for no reason other than to support Richard, but included as a matter of course, because of course he is Richard’s family. He’s allowed to go to the intimate ceremony with Henry’s signet ring and formally taking his place as Earl—a gathering only Jeff and Richard were otherwise at. Even Joachim stayed outside.
And, ah, Joachim. The gender-nonconforming gay man of Jeffrey’s heart with long hair and boots and makeup. A man that Seigi could look at, after ten volumes of growth, and envy his flaunting of gender norms.
The man Jeffrey drove himself to illness to protect and hide his love for, a result Seigi watched with some amount of horror and concern. A display that made Seigi realize that not only would Richard be able to keep his family if Richard was queer—they kept Jeffrey—but that hiding himself that way would hurt him, the same way it hurt Akatsuki and Tatsuki.
And at the end of it all, the word Seigi finds for the life he wants with Richard? The relationship where he can support Richard in anything, and drop anything just to help and support Richard, to make a life both in work and out of work with, the one he wants to share a life with?
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