“Excuse me.”
“Yes.” He turns around, still spraying the boat.
“Where’s the ferry?”
“The Nagashima ferry?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you need the ferry when there’s the bridge?”
She doesn’t know how to answer him, knows that he is pointing at it, but she keeps her eyes on the fishing boats.
“You have family over there?”
Again, she isn’t sure how to answer him. But he has already walked away.
She leaves her suitcase on the dock, near the fishing boats, and walks into town. It has never been much of a town, just the simple main street, which has changed hardly at all. There is still the market area, with the same seafood smell as before, the place where there used to be a good noodle shop, now a parking lot, the bus station across the street. She enters a convenience store, picks out a couple of rice balls—one salmon, the other pickled plum—and a bottle of green tea.
When the girl at the register tells her the total and puts it in a bag, she realizes that she has left her money in the suitcase.
“I’m sorry, I forgot my money. I’ll be right back.” She hurries out of the shop, feels that everyone is watching her. Keeping her head down, she doesn’t lift it until she hears the water against the dock, and it is this which reminds her of how close she is to Nagashima. How good it will be to see Mr. Shirayama once again.
Untying a fishing boat is easier than she had imagined. Instead of coiling the rope inside the boat, she leaves it on the dock. No need for a rope where she is going. Much of the town is eating dinner now; the fishermen will not be coming out to their boats for another few hours.
She ignores the small motor, pulls out the oars, points the boat eastward. The bridge is off to her left. Facing straight ahead, she rows; her suitcase falls against the side of the boat, and she leaves it there. She begins to turn the boat in a northerly direction. Now, she can look freely in two directions and not see the bridge.
There are many stars out tonight, stars that she has missed; the city lights swallow most of them. It is the stars that keep her attention until the boat scrapes the rocky bottom and comes to rest on the shore.
acknowledgments
The following sources were of invaluable help in writing this novel: Fukuoka University Medical Library; Bethany Leigh Grenald’s online article on the pearl divers in Japan; the World Health Organization’s archives; the Leprosy Mission’s website; Minoru Yasuhara’s wonderful photos of Nagashima; the HIH Prince Takamatsu Memorial Museum of Hansen’s Disease; and the book
Leprosy in Theory and Practice,
by Drs. R. G. Cochrane and T. Frank Davey (John Wright & Sons, Ltd.).
I’d like to thank the following in Japan for their help and support on this novel: the Nagashima Leprosarium, for allowing me to roam the island; all the patients at Nagashima, in particular, Mr.
Tanigawa and Mr. Usami, for their incredible courage and for sharing their lives with me; Mrs. Ikenaga and Mr. Shimura, patients at the Kumamoto Sanatorium; Mr. Tadashige Fujimaru, my first friend in Japan; Hisako Okamura, for allowing me to see Nagashima with my own eyes; Doctor Yoriaki Kamiryo; my Yukuhashi Cosmate and Jono Cultural Center students; my Japanese in-laws; Yuki and Sayon, for their love of reading; and my wife, Aya, and son, Sam.
In the United States: my family of women—my mother and sisters, Kim and Teresa; Grandma Talarigo for her stories; Uncle Dick for his letter; and my father, Grandpa Talarigo, and Grandma Carlos, so much of this book is you; Colum McCann, for his faith and friendship; my publisher, Nan Talese, and my wonderful editor, Lorna Owen, for her passion for this book and helping to make it better; and finally, to Karin, wherever you may be.
epilogue
There are times, while walking here in the morning or going back home at night, that I think of how so many of the patients began their isolation in my town. The dock where the ferry used to take them across the channel was less than half a mile from where I grew up, from where I still live today.
Since I am one of the newer nurses—I’ve been here for less than two years—I have many duties. Some of them are medical-related, but there are many times when I have to do things outside of the medical realm. For the past couple of months I have spent a lot of my time up in the building they call the Lighthouse, along with Mr. Shirayama, sorting through all these items.
We haven’t thrown out all that much, mostly pushing things around, the towering ceiling echoing each grunt and groan. Some of them are quite large—old desks, cabinets, shelves—and those we have left where they stand, until we can get some of the staff to help move them. But many things in there are small, tiny as a hand, a nail of a finger, even. And it is some of those that we are setting aside, things that cannot be parted with.
Everything is sorted into categories—medical, patients, entertainment, historical, miscellaneous—and by periods of time—prewar, the forties and fifties, the sixties and seventies, and the most recent times, from the eighties up until now.
There is a story for each thing in here—many of the things have multiple stories—sometimes bringing back a moment so vividly that Mr. Shirayama is lost for an unknown amount of time, sitting there, holding the item, remembering. For a while, I say nothing, then break him from his thoughts, ask him to tell me about it. There are times when it takes no more than a minute; others, half the morning. When he is finished, we set the item aside, categorize it, and move on to the next.
I remember a
staff member taking me around the place when I first came here as a nurse and I kept thinking, it isn’t as bad as I had thought. There were TVs, gardens, flowers along the cement pathways; the patients had electric wheelchairs, nice clean rooms; there was a small supermarket. And this is how I continued thinking about the place for my first two or three months working here. It wasn’t until I was out on a walk with Miss Fuji that my thoughts started changing. We had stopped down at the dock and were admiring Key of the Hand Island and the Inland Sea, which was calm as glass. My hands rested on the handles of her wheelchair. We stood that way for quite a while before she spoke.
“If you didn’t know what was behind you, this would be a beautiful place.”
That is when I began looking at this place differently, began asking myself, What was this place like all those years when none of us were paying any attention? I started noticing those old ivy-smothered buildings that remained, the rotting boats, the old sheds, noticing what was underneath all the gloss, as Miss Fuji calls it.
Nearly every moment that I am with her, I want to tell Miss Fuji who I am, but as of yet, I haven’t, haven’t quite found the courage to do so. Sometimes, I feel that she senses it, but maybe that is only me. I’m certain that someday I will tell her, probably one of those things I will blurt out before I can stop myself from saying it.
This hot September morning, I help Miss Fuji with her sponge bath and her clothes. She doesn’t want to eat much; she never eats much in the mornings. While she eats the peaches I have readied for her, I put away the futon, move the table back into the center of the room, open the curtains.
Although it is hot, a nice breeze comes up from the Inland Sea every once in awhile. Today, Miss Fuji wants to go to the Hill of Light and see the flower gardens planted around the large bell. I push her up the hill, for she refuses to get one of those electric wheelchairs. It isn’t all that steep and there is a sidewalk winding its way up. A sweat has broken out on my face and I wipe it off with a small hand towel. I go and sit on the middle of the three steps leading to the platform where the bell is. The chrysanthemums envelope the platform, and, like the ones I used to buy so many years ago, they are still the most beautiful flowers I have ever seen. Miss Fuji gets out of the wheelchair and starts up the steps. I stand to help her, but she gently swats my hand away.
She pulls back on the wooden pole hanging from two large chains and throws it at the bell, sending a loud rumble all over the place. She does it again and looks over at me.
“Your turn.”
I step up to the bell and throw the wooden pole, its rumble echoes, and I feel its vibration throughout my body. When I can feel it no more, I do it again.
Miss Fuji is standing there watching me.
“Can you hear the bell over in Mushiage?”
“Yes.”
We say nothing else. She starts down the steps; this time she lets me take her hand.
Sometimes when the sun is warm and the channel still, I take my lunch down along the shore to the small inlet that faces Mushiage. There are times when I sit and eat my lunch while watching the channel, other times when I remove my shoes and socks and wade out knee-high into the water. And it is from there that I imagine that I see two small children, my brother and myself, over there on the mainland, playing on the shore, answering the waves of a pearl diver with waves of their own.
JEFF TALARIGO
the pearl diver
Jeff Talarigo, a former journalist, lived in a Palestinian refugee camp where he wrote several works of short fiction that were published in literary journals, including
The Maryland Review
,
The Arkansas Review
, and
Chanteh
. He has been writing and teaching English in Japan since the early 1990s, and lives with his wife and son on the island of Kyushu.
FIRST ANCHOR BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 2005
Copyright © 2004 by Jeff Talarigo
Anchor Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places,
events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used
fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to quote:
the Imperial Household Agency, for Empress Sadako’s tanka for Hansen’s disease; the
Akashi Kaijin Support Group, for the tanka by Akashi Kaijin, from the poetry
collection
Haku Byo
, 1939.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Nan A. Talese/Doubleday edition
as follows:
Talarigo, Jeff.
The pearl diver: a novel / Jeff Talarigo.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Pearl divers—Fiction. 2. Women—Japan—Fiction. 3. Leprosy—Patients—Fiction.
4. Leprosy—Hospitals—Fiction. 5. Kokuritsu Ryåyåjo Nagashima Aiseien—Fiction.
6. Japan—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3620.A525P43 2004
813’.6—dc21
2003054893
eISBN: 978-0-307-42914-8
v3.0