At the outset of the novel, our nineteen-year-old unnamed heroine
belongs to an exclusive group: she is one of a handful of pearl divers, women
of all ages who plumb the depths of Japan’s Seto Inland Sea and bring up
lobster, clams, other mussels, and on lucky days, pearls. She is still young and naïve when she’s forced
to leave her beloved vocation. She’s found to have the dreaded curse-like
plague of leprosy. In an instant she falls from her exalted, insular position
to the level of the lowest outcast of Japanese society. She’s shunned, sent
away to an island prison of the leprosarium, and even forced to change her
name.
It turns out she has a non-infectious form of the disease,
and treatments are developed during her early years in care keep her own case
from progressing very far. She becomes a helper to the staff, giving massages,
transporting those worse-off in wheelchairs, pulling nurse duty. She retains a
certain independence in the patient community, earning its affection and
respect, while making the facility’s officials suspicious.
Events unfold with an understated force: our heroine adopts
the name Miss Fuji, and we learn of the climb of the famous mountain with her
uncle when a little girl. She sneaks off the isolation of the island to her
hometown, but is caught and sent to solitary confinement, and then forced to
help with the grisly eugenic work done at the clinic. She visits Kyoto and sees
various sights there to honor a man who has passed away. When at length, after
struggles against the superstitious authorities, and more than forty years in
the isolation of quarantine, Miss Fuji takes a flat in normal society. Maybe
she’s planning her own death. She finds, however, an alien world, where pearl
diving is turned into a tourist attraction, featuring nubile, bikini-clad girls
who have never been more than ankle-deep.
In the end, though, she makes a surprising decision about
the end of her days. Her life has been one of service to those even less
fortunate than herself. At various times during her life, she knows others
value and love her, and in their limited ways, return the charity she herself
has shown. This is a tale of quiet heartbreak, but also of fulfilling forays
into relations with other human beings, united in their isolation. Mr. Talarigo
has written a restrained, graceful examination of how afflicted souls support
each other, and how the superstitious so easily and brutally shun them. A
beautiful, balanced book, and recommended very highly.
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