The Pearl Diver

February 16, 2004
This unusual debut novel set in 1940s postwar Japan renders brutality and intolerance in quiet, lyrical prose. When a 19-year-old pearl diver, the youngest of a crew working the Seto Inland Sea, discovers she is sick with leprosy, she is banished to Nagashima, an island leprosarium, where she is told to change her name and forget her past. Nagashima is its own kind of civilization, where the renamed "Miss Fuji" must care for the sicker patients, which includes helping the island doctors perform forced, often late-term abortions. Treated with drugs that make her isolation unnecessary, Miss Fuji remains healthy ("she has only the two spots on her body.... Medals or curses, she isn't sure how to wear them"), but she is still not permitted to leave and remains a captive for most of her life. The novel is divided into three sections, with the middle (and by far most substantial) section revealing its story through artifacts, as each object evokes a haunting, smaller story. At times the characters are drawn as artifacts themselves, with strained, wooden dialogue ("You deserve to be with all these freaks here." "There are no freaks here, only people who are sick"). As if to mimic his protagonist's bracketed sense of time, Talarigo details minute scenes and interactions, then jumps decades ahead. It's an effect that de-emphasizes his dramatic subject matter and allows the emotional consequences of the situation to surface in unexpected ways, as when Miss Fuji finds solace in watching children playing on a nearby shore. Drawing from actual medical history, Talarigo succeeds in telling a compelling story whose strength is its elegant simplicity.