It’s still Day Three of JR Week (somehow. In my time zone, anyway), which is Jeffrey’s Day.
(Yes, I know I skipped Day Two; I didn’t have any thoughts, okay)
Jeffrey is represented by the Alexandrite stone, which in addition to symbolizing wealth and prosperity and good fortune is basically a Magic Color Changing Stone: the color shifts depending on what light you view in under.
The first sections obviously mark Jeffrey’s place as probably the wealthiest and most ostentatious of the Claremont family that we see in the series. Jeff tried to use his money to help save his brother, it destroyed his relationship with Richard, he uses it again to seek information on Richard and damages Richard and Vince’s relationship, he works in some vague financial role in America…
Well. There’s a reason Richard calls him a talking wallet.
But the color-changing thing is more interesting to me. Before volume ten, it seemed to be representing the way Jeff betrayed Richard and caused Richard to switch from seeing him as his dearest brother and one of his most important people in his entire life to…well, someone he never wanted to see or hear from again. Someone he viewed as danger.
But after volume ten…
Well, Seigi never trusted Jeffrey originally. He knew enough of Richard’s family by the time he met Jeff not to trust him until he got more details.
And after we discover that Jeffrey is a closeted gay man who has been hiding himself from his family for…well, decades, honestly, at that point, the light shifts.
And we see him different. And we see the way his alexandrite represents him differently.
Jeffrey can’t really be his full self…anywhere, not for a long, long time. His family and his job and his public self can’t be gay, and anything he does with romance or sex has to be divorced from his identity so rumors and scandals don’t spread. He cannot be seen as who he is all at once in one setting. It’s too dangerous.
This starts to break down a little–at least, his family learns what he’s been keeping to himself and Joachim is apparently just traveling the world with hm, but even then Jeffrey is a fairly private person. The people close to him may be able to see the full spectrum of his colors, but I really quite doubt most of the world does.
And I just still am floored that Tsujimura-sensei pulled that one off.
One of Richard’s (multiple) birthstones in Tanzanite. Tanzanite in Jeweler Richard usually symbolizes Seigi: Tanzanite means “Rebirth” and is the chapter in which Seigi begins a huge transformation. He suffers pretty serious trauma, has to get therapy, and when we see him next, it’s years later, he’s grown up, he has new skills, he’s graduated college, and he’s starting life over anew in a completely different country. And, he can be mistaken for Richard.
Wow.
But you know, Richard had a rebirth of his own. It’s in backstory, and the anime skips a lot of Richard’s backstory, but he does, well, have one. He, too, was deeply traumatized and ran off to Sri Lanka. So for his birthday, let’s talk a bit about how he was reborn from Richard Claremont to Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian.
The chapter with the bulk of Richard’s backstory is actually Zircon, which, among many other things, is known as a time capsule stone because it’s the oldest stone ever found on Earth, and it just. Does not destroy easily. It usually just grinds down to…smaller zircons. It’s ancient and it holds the memories of when it was formed and what it was formed of for…well, forever.
And where and when Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian was formed was in a house in Sri Lanka with a young girl who was dealing with her own trauma and healing and a grumpy Sri Lankan gem dealer who expected him to pull himself back together out of the stuff that was once Richard Claremont and the stuff that Richard could be. Saul wouldn’t let himself throw “Richard” away—where he came from still mattered. And Richard Ranasinghe de Vulpian carries those memories and the person he allowed himself to become there for the rest of his life.
In Sri Lanka, he took care of someone. He found his career in gemstones—as an honest gem dealer. He learned he couldn’t run away from his past completely, but it also didn’t need to continue defining himself by it. He found a new purpose in life and instead of being a language tutor for a traumatized rich girl with a fiancée he proposed to for fear of losing a friend, he was a bright young gem dealer and international businessman who found beauty in life and helped make sure others saw it too.
Sure, he’s still made of the same stuff as he was before. But he was recreated in Sri Lanka, and he became a new man, with a new name, just as Seigi became a new man with a name that wasn’t part of his biological family, either.
I’d been asked about this before, so I thought I may as well drop this here!
In the bits of free time I can find I’ve been translating some of The Case Files of Jeweler Richard’s short stories, focusing the ones outside the fanbook. I intend to add to this bit by bit, translating whatever story strikes my fancy, but for now you can find the four extra stories included with the blu-rays, plus three other stories from various sources.
They’re definitely worth the read if you haven’t read them before, so I hope you enjoy!
I know, I know. I just posted the essay this morning, and I already have an amendment? Yes, I do, and here’s why:
When I wrote the initial essay, I kept things to an overview for a lot of reasons, but the initial concept I wanted for it was “queerness” and the way that essay was structured dove into a lot of experiences from a lot of different labels under the queer umbrella and a lot of experiences that are universal to the community. There’s a reason why it’s a united community. I just wanted to use that essay to write about queerness.
I didn’t specify any labels for Richard in that essay except “queer” and “cis” because those are what I know he is. Richard never labels himself in the series, and it’s because of the way the series is, I think that’s at least half intentional. Labels get used…sometimes in the series, but usually not in reference to actual characters, just as theoreticals.
But you know what I like? Labels. And Richard’s a fictional character so he can’t protest when I staple some on him. Labels like “ace” and “aro.” Because that’s what I think he is.
(Labelling real humans with words they don’t use is bad and wrong; don’t do that.)
I concluded that essay earlier with Richard having sorted himself out and figured out who he was by the time he was leaving Sri Lanka, or at least by the time he landed in Japan, since there was a little layover in Hong Kong for a while. But what if…no? What if?
Wait, wait, hear me out! This essay isn’t going to totally contradict my last one (although if it did, I wouldn’t care, because Lit Interpretation means allowing for more than one interpretation to be correct, and there’s plenty I don’t know). I think this amendment is compatible in a lovely way.
Queer is an umbrella term. Remember that post I made saying Richard spent the first three books with a crush he did not ask for being very mad about it? You want to know what makes people really frustrated and angry? Thinking they’ve figured themselves out and then something comes along that confuses that. You know who that happens to a lot? Gray-ace and gray-aro people. Because when you realize you’ve never really felt romantic or sexual attraction to someone, you get used to that, you work on accepting a queer identity that society is hostile too, and then suddenly you feel attractions you’re not used to? What even is that, why is it happening, and what do you do with it? Can you make it stop? Do you want it to? This was not you assumed your life experience was going to be like. Why is it changing? Are you still ace? Are you still aro? What if those people who told you that you’d change if you me the right person were right all along (they weren’t, fuck those people)?
There are so many questions that pop up when things change in your life. Richard has a long lecture about “sexuality can be fluid, suckers,” in Paraiba Tourmaline, and while gray-aspec identities are not inherently fluid, they can seem that way a lot, and Richard could well feel he transitioned from aro to gray aro or even from aro to gay, or aro to bisexual, or anything else. He was talking to Tanimoto, but that doesn’t mean his words weren’t rooted in things he experienced himself.
I think Richard knew he was at least queer by the time he made it to Japan. But I don’t know how much he knew beyond that. He knew he was weird and different and couldn’t conform to society’s expectations of him gender and relationship-wise. That’s all “queer” really requires, which is why it’s a lovely umbrella term for people who can’t or don’t care to puzzle it out further than that, and for all the people who fall under that umbrella.
And if he didn’t have romantic attraction to Deborah, which is a solid possibility, that means Seigi may very well be the first time he did have a crush, and once he recognized what it was…what? Why now? Why couldn’t this happen sooner? He lost so much not feeling that way about people. He spent so much time coming to terms with not having a typical romantic relationship; why does he want one now? Is what he feels for Seigi romantic? It’s certainly not the same as what he feels for most people. How can he tell?
And thus: frustrated Richard being frustrated and annoyed for books, until he, like Seigi, made it to the end of White Sapphire and went “Whether I know what this is or not, whatever it is, it’s desperately important to me and I’m going to fight to keep it forever.”
We don’t know for sure when Richard’s realizations were, or what specific moments they were caused by. If Act Three gives us this, I will lose my entire mind with joy. But there are a lot of little places it can slot in, and much like with Seigi, it can be a work in progress.
(Author’s Note: This post is over 2,300 words long according to Microsoft Word and has images in it. There is no “read more” link. If you do not want to read this many words of me rambling about Richard’s queer backstory, 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!)
Talking about Seigi’s queer-coming-of-age is easy and I do it often, because, well, it’s what The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler books focus on the most, since he’s the protagonist, thus the books are his story, and it is the story of The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler. It’s easy to go “Good lord, you are not a straight man,” at Seigi, because what is Seigi even doing? But Richard’sbackstory may in fact be one of the queerest things I’ve ever read.
The anime covers almost none of Richard’s young childhood, or his backstory in general, or his personality in…general, but we get more of it in the novels. Richard as a kid was much like he as an adult: shy, quiet, introverted, awkward, intelligent as anything, fascinated by pretty rocks and jewelry, in love with languages, and largely friendless. Even Claremont family servants didn’t like him, because they thought he was strange and unchildlike (and it turns out later, they don’t like him because he’s queer, too, and isn’t going to be reproducing children on a convenient schedule to carry on the family name).
Of the friends he did have, it’s not especially surprising that he doesn’t seem to really have considered them true friends. He expressed affection in odd ways that they didn’t interpret as he meant them. He gave gifts that seemed excessive and performed acts of service that no one else would’ve considered, and this behavior had everyone assuming he was queer well before he seems to have realized that himself.
He was shy, awkward, and loved wrong.
And on top of that, they seemed to be using him as a replacement. Richard was, in many ways, and entirely against his will, treated as a mini-Catherine. He hated growing up looking a mirror and seeing “his mother’s face” looking back at him. It might even be part of the reason his family was somewhat cold to him—Catherine didn’t leave much a positive impression on the Claremont family, for certain. He didn’t (and doesn’t) hate his mother, but he didn’t want to be her, and he is already so much like her that they have difficulties getting along.
Richard is androgynous enough to be mistaken for a woman on occasion. He even dressed as one in London to disguise himself when rescuing Seigi from a museum, and he really put no effort into it other than putting women’s clothing on. Seigi mentions himself that Richard’s beauty is not really masculine or feminine and Richard could easily be mistaken for either except that he wears three-piece suits, keeps his hair fairly short, and is a cis man. His manga design, I think, illustrates his androgyny best:
When you get a shot of his just his face, it is legitimately kind of confusing what gender he is supposed to be.
At boarding school, Richard had male classmates fighting over him as trophy—something he didn’t ask for, didn’t want, and something that was blamed on him. After all, he was Different. He was distractingly gorgeous, even to boys, his expressions of affection too strong, too violative of accepted boundaries, and he loved pretty, girly things like jewelry. He was soft and gentle and kind. He didn’t fit the definition they wanted to impose on a young boy growing into a man, and he didn’t fit into womanhood, either. He’s too pretty, too confusing, looks too much like a woman and acts too much unlike a man. Any indication of queerness on the part of these other young upstanding young men was his fault. because society views queerness as contagious (and isn’t it, in a way? Once a person meets a queer person, they’re much more likely to discover the parts of themselves that are queer). He was obviously strange, and obviously feminine, which made him dangerous to The Order of Things.
When he invited some of these friends to visit him over the summer in France while he stayed at a villa with his mother, once they laid eyes on his mother, all thought of Richard disappeared from their heads. Why would they need his male beauty when a female equivalent existed right there? Much more proper. Much more appropriate for them. Much more…what they wanted.
Richard was only a substitute when they needed one. He was the closest thing to a beautiful woman. When an actual woman was there (especially one that could rival his own odd beauty), it turned out they only really liked him for that, and they dropped him. And Richard was so hurt by discovering he was just a replacement and a convenience for straight people that he stopped inviting people to see his mother. He wouldn’t even invite Deborah, his fiancée, a woman, to meet his mother, because…what if? What if he was just a replacement again?
Richard did not bring anyone back home again to meet Catherine until Seigi. This is fascinating, because Seigi did a lot of substitution when they first met. Every time he would think of his intense, queer feelings for Richard, he immediately, before he even realized what was happening, redirected them at a woman. With Tanimoto, or later even just a theoretical woman.
There’s a great manga cap of Seigi telling his college buddies about his gorgeous foreign boss and they all assume he’s talking about a woman. This is what Seigi’s head was doing in the background all throughout the first act of The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler.
This is also what Richard’s friend did to him.
I could write a whole other essay about Seigi and Richard and Catherine and compulsory heterosexuality, and I honestly really want to, but that’s a long derailment and this about is about Richard. And speaking of Richard and Deborah, wow, Richard. Wow. On the surface, that seems so normal. Lonely man finally finds someone who cares about him, he falls in love, and his family ruins it.
Except I’m not sure that’s actually what happened.
Deborah was someone he loved, someone he wanted to build a life with, maybe, but most importantly, she was a friend he thought understood him, one he might be able to keep after everyone he kept losing.
I don’t know if I can’t explain to alloromantic people what reading about Richard choosing a life partner based not on romantic affection but on a desperate desire to be able to keep a friend and not be alone was like for me as an aromantic person. Amatonormativity spends so much time insisting that you get one life partner, they must be a romantic life partner, and all other relationships are expendable in favor of your romantic spouse.
This insistence hurts everyone, but it especially hurts people who never really wanted to or managed to form a romantic bond with other people that was acceptable and valid enough. And it doubly hurts people like Richard, who already has such strong abandonment issues after his friends and parents mostly dropped him and pushed him off on other people.
And damn if it wasn’t one of my first times reading a fictional character struggling with that.
But Deborah was willing to marry him, even without romance. He finally had someone, and he clung to her. The timeline of The Case Files of Richard the Jeweler is frequently messy and often inconsistent, but it is very likely he proposed to her after he realized that marriage to her might not even be possible due to the legal restrictions of The Will (of course, interracial marriages have their own long history with this that I am far from qualified to speak on, so I won’t).
His family, particularly Jeffrey, was supportive despite that…at first. Richard’s uncle was willing to let Richard marry who he wanted (after all, Richard was the spare, wasn’t he? Godfrey had two real sons). Right up until it became obvious after spending years with lawyers that there was simply no reconciling Richard’s love with the family’s needs, and Richard was expected to set aside his desires in order to conform to the family’s expectations and support the family in the ways they demanded it. Deborah was not an Acceptable partner, and society was going to look at the whole family, Richard. Time to bury yourself and do your duty and marry someone you don’t and maybe even can’t love.
The amount of historical pain queer people have, being forced to do this, is immeasurable.
Richard’s love, as queer as it was, was taken from him. Deborah told him she didn’t even know why he thought it would work out in the first place, which is brutally harsh. It became obvious the biological family he had wouldn’t support it, and he simply couldn’t do it anymore. He had spent years trying and failing to win their approval, but they had finally taken too much from him.
He ran to an entirely different country and refused to respond to the legal name on all his legal paperwork. Richard might not be trans, as much as some of his androgyny sometimes speaks to that experience (see again: hatred of growing up with his mother’s face), and the series provides little if any allowance to interpret him that way, but Good Lord, running away from your family to start fresh with a new identity? There’s a reason that around a quarter of homeless youth in the UK are some variety of queer.
Richard was wealthy enough to run off to another country for his mental health crisis, and he picked not only one where his family, his own namesake, had been safe to love freely before, but a country that was, once, a place with much looser laws around homosexuality than the UK that made it a so safe place for queer British colonialists to settle in safety.
Saul and Seigi both question Richard’s motivations for his actions as a con artist (why is he selling valuable stones for cheap to people he likes, and punishing people he doesn’t?). Here is the thing about that: this was not only something that he inherited from his grandmother whose love was also looked down on by society, but it’s something he didn’t respect, something he loathed. His behavior was meant to punish himself.
It’s important that he was using gemstones for this: something he loved, something that wasn’t accepted as something a man should love, but that he found innately beautiful and compelling anyway. He hurt himself with them and punished himself with them because he hadn’t ever been allowed to love those parts of himself. He didn’t see himself as worthy, or see a way to love these things healthily in a way that both he, and they, deserved. Saul told him in Sri Lanka that he could see the love of gemstones light up his eyes, even though Richard was certainly trying to hide it at that point and wasn’t willing to accept that about himself.
Saul also tells Richard at this time that he has no self-awareness, and no introspection. Sound like someone else we know? Sound anything like queer people who don’t know their way or what they want yet? Richard was still spinning wildly out of control back then, and I’ll argue he still hadn’t quite realized anything about his own queerness.
And the thing that healed him, the thing that scarred over these wounds and allowed him to live, was a found family made of people who loved them the way he loved. People who encouraged him to be himself, even as a weird as that person was. Who encouraged, very specifically, a fairly transgressive love of jewelry and beauty and told him not only was it okay that he loved that, but that he could make that love his life.
Monica, Saul’s adopted daughter, was adopted from one of Saul’s own little found family members: one of his very best friends gave Saul custody of her welfare after his death instead of a biological family member. Monica escaped an abusive marriage to come with Saul and find her own healing. Saul’s sister-in-law came to study gemstones and jewelry with him while they were both mourning the loss of Saul’s wife and Maya’s sister. Richard found Saul there, who Seigi even says is much alike Richard in the way they are stubbornly kind, gentle-hearted men. All of them found familial love with each other when romantic love wasn’t working out for any of them, when their biological families couldn’t support them anymore.
Specifically, when Richard’s biological family decided he was too much and too wrong for them, he made his own little patchwork family to replace them. Found Family is one of the queerest tropes there is, because too often queer people are rejected from the homes they are born in and it is their way of making a new place for themselves with new people. Like I said earlier: queer realizations might be just a little contagious. People who defy society’s expectations are a much more likely place to find your own deviancies than society is.
Some four years after living with this little found family made of people who love the same things he does, the same way he does, all in ways that society doesn’t necessarily respect, Richard has the introspection and self-awareness Saul knew he lacked. By the time we meet him in Japan alongside Seigi, it’s pretty obvious he figured out who he is and how he loves, and that this way is very, very queer. And he seems pretty damn okay with it!
It was with these people that Richard found himself and found some kind of inner peace. He healed. And he didn’t necessarily heal the best he could’ve—I’ve more than once referred to this series as akin to watching a poorly-healed fractured leg being rebroken and set with pins so it heals straight and true, and that is as true of Richard as it is of Seigi and any of their customers.
But it was something he needed then to live.
They allowed and encouraged him to love people in ways society didn’t approve of, love things society didn’t approve of, let him be a strange, wild disaster for a few years, and he came out of it finally knowing who and what he was.
I got curious to see just how slow of a burn Jeweler Richard is, and you can see the fruit of my labors, as well as the numbers I used to determine everything, above.
Basically, I first estimated how many Japanese characters there were using some set guidelines and some simple math (Japanese pages are basically an even grid, which is nice), and then used a constant to roughly estimate how many English words that would come out to. These are some pretty conservative estimates on my part, so if I were to make a guess I’d say the actual count is somewhere in the upper third of the range.
This series is actually longer than I thought! I should not be surprised, and yet I am!!
I posted these on Twitter, too, but I thought I may as well put them here.
These were originally going to be a part of a much more spoiler-heavy “watch as I yell about this series” ppt, which may still get done in the future I suppose, but I at least wanted to post these two slides I’d finished.
The Case Files of Jeweler Richard is an INCREDIBLY wild ride, but part 2 is especially “did I really just read that not in a fanfic, but in the Actual Book” kind of wild.
Cleopatra’s Pearl (Cleopatra no shinju) / 1st volume bonus short story (originally published 2015/12)
Daily Life in Etranger: Professor Kunz and Morgan (Etranger no nichijyou Kuntsu hakase to Morugan) / 1st volume bonus for Chou Shoten Comicomi Studio (originally published 2015/12)
Chrysoprase of Connections (Tsuna gu Chrysoprase) / Emerald bonus short story (originally published 2016/5)
Boundless Celestite (Kuubaku no celestite) / Aquamarine bonus short story (originally published 2016/11)
Overcast Iolite (Donten no iolite) / Lapis Lazuli bonus short story (originally published 2017/2)
Moonstone’s Affections (Moonstone no jiai) / Lapis Lazuli digital bonus (originally published 2017/2)
Reminscing Tiger’s Eye (Furikaereba tiger eye) / Peridot bonus short story (originally published 2017/8)
Herkimer Diamond’s Dream (Herkimer diamond no yume) / Peridot bonus short story for Chuou shoten Comicomi Studio (originally published 2017/8)
Day of Celebration (Oiwai no hi) / Hakuensha Orange Bunko 3 years anniversary short story (originally published 2017/12)
Travelogue: Buddhism on Kamakura (Kamakura bukyou kikou) / Tanzanite bonus short story originally published 2018/1)
Delicious Recipe (Oishi recipe) / Tanzanite bonus short story for Chuou Shoten Comicomi Studio (originally published 2018/1)
A Story about Suits (Suits no hanashi) / Kouhouseki bonus short story (originally published 2018/6)
A Story about Ramen (Ramen no hanashi) / Kouhouseki bonus short story for Chuou Shoten Comicomi Studio (originally published 2018/6)
Santa Invasion (Santa shurai) / Natsu no niwa bonus short story (originally published 2018/12)
Mr. Richard’s Cooking Classroom (Richard sensei no oryouri kyoushitsu) / Natsu no niwa bonus short story for Chuou Shoten Comicomi Studio (originally published 2018/12)
The Bookstore in Columbo (Columbo no shoten) / Hakuensha Orange Bunko 4th Anniversary short story (originally published 2019/8)
Play of Color (This title is in English/katakana) / Sango bonus short story (originally published 2019/8)
Shimomura’s Older Friend (Shimomura to toshiue no tomodachi) / Sango bonus short story for Chuou Shoten Comicomi Studio (originally published 2019/8)
Identity(This title is in English/katakana) / Tsujimura Nanako website (originally published 2017/4)
To Include in Celebrations (Oiwai ni yosu) / Tsujimura Nanako website (originally published 2018/5)
Mooncake Season (Mooncake no kisetsu) / Tsujimura Nanako website (originally published 2018/9)
At the Airport (Kuukou nite) / Tsujimura Nanako website (originally published 2017/12)
New Era (Shinjidai) / Tsujimura Nanako website (originally published 2019/5)
Jewelery Box (Housekisho) / for fanbook (originally published 2019/11)
Nakata’s Sri Lanka Diary (Sri Lanka Nakata nikki) / for fanbook (originally published 2019/11)
Operaphile(Opera biiki) / for fanbook (originally published 2019/11)
Bit By Bit (Tsumikasane) / for volume 1 anime release (originally published 2020/4)
Waiting for the Ally of Justice (Seigi no mikata wo machi nagara) / for volume 2 of the anime release (originally published 2020/4)
After Jade (Hisui no hanashi、sono ato) / for volume 3 of the anime release (originally published 2020/5)
Mr. Richard’s English Classroom (Richard-sensei no eikaiwa kyoushitsu) / for volume 4 of the anime release (originally published 2020/6)
Dragon Season (Ryuu no kisetsu) / Cobalt online web zine (originally published 2020/4)
Biographies of the Uncompromising Nakata’s Ramen Shop - Tempestuous Pudding Chapter (Kodawari ramen Nakata yaretsuden ― shippuudotou purin-hen) / Tsujimura Nanako website) (originally published 2020/5)
The Checkered Half-Life of Edward Baxter (Edward Baxter no suuki naru hanshuu) / Cobalt online web zine (Originally published 2020/6)
Tinted Glasses (Iromegane) / Limited Edition volume ten short story (originally published 2020/6)
Someday June 28th (Itsuka no rokugatsu juuhachi nichi) / Tsujimura Nanako website (originally published 2020/6)
(Thanks to @riku7seandSaicoink for giving me a hand compiling the romanji and info)
Reason number 39484843 why I love Richard Ranasignhe de Vulpian:
He’s one of the most accurate depictions of someone in their late twenties I’ve ever seen? He has this blend of narrow hyper-competence in his chosen fields warring with raging emotional immaturity and the inability to do basic human functions that just feels so very 28-years-old.
