The Pearl Diver
Jeff Talarigo
(Reviewer - Rebecca Brown)
2004 Nan A. Talese Books
ISBN: 0385510519

In 1948 Japan, a young pearl diver, at the top of her skill, learns she has leprosy.

Come into another world where women dive into the Inland Sea for a living, such as it is. They seek kelp, sea urchins, octopus, lobsters ... & the elusive pearl. Some women have made comfortable lives, although their labors leave them marked for life & sometimes danger & fear is just one breath away.

She notices a spot on her arm first, & the numbness. When another develops on her back, she walks into town to the doctor. It is the dread leprosy, & she cannot go home to her family for she has now shamed them. No one will marry her older sister & her parents' land will lose value. The only person she can tell before hiding in a barn is Miyako who will, silently, leave food outside ... until the policemen come to escort her to the rowboat that takes her across her beloved sea to Nagashima Island, to the leper colony from which no one ever returns.

There she must face the callous ministrations of a medical team as steeped in shame as the people of her village. There she is at the mercy of doctors & nurses who force her into chemical baths & to sleep on the floor, yet the worst is the loss of her life: her clothes, her diving, the sea, her money ... even her name.

& the years pass, she learns to offer comfort, listen to the stories of her fellow internees, & study to become a nurse.

Even as the new drug, Promin is tried on her -- the leprosy is only mild & does not worsen. When the internees revolt against the heartlessness of their care, the island is awash in death, & still she survives.

& then she decides to escape to a new life hidden in the bowels of the city across the water where she hopes she will find useful work, yet the island calls her back where she will live to a ripe old age.

The Pearl Diver is a sad, strange & exquisitely written if disjointed glimpse into the treatment of people infected with leprosy in a time when a society still did not understand the disease & was filled with shame & prejudice. The only redemption & humanity in this book is found in the compassion of the internees in the colony.

Jeff Talarigo grew up in the United States. After living in a Palestinian refugee camp in the early 1990s, he has been living in Japan with his wife & son.
(07/18/04)

Rebecca