The Pearl Diver Read online

  But, after almost four years of knowing Mr. Shirayama, he has told her some things, or at least allowed them to slip out. It was in 1939, eight years after they opened this facility, nine years before she arrived here, that Mr. Shirayama traveled nearly a hundred miles by freight train, and then, from the station, walked the remaining twelve. It was spring, most of the way a slight grade down toward the coast, from where he took the ferry the final five minutes here.

  Unlike herself, he hadn’t hidden from the police. His parents had delivered him to them. That is all he has ever told her of his years with his parents—they never looking back at him as they left the police station. Still, to this day, it is their backs that he remembers, and the huge burden he placed on them. He was a disgrace to his family, neighbors, town, a fifteen-year-old boy who stoked unmentionable fear into others, one who had become a burden to the country’s expansionist dreams, and the wars that were a part of it.

  Burden. That one word damaged him more than the disease. Burden—those little mites that gather in your tatami mats, in your futon, the splinter deep under your finger— something that you can go on living with, but with nearly every move, you are reminded of it. The constant reminder from all those people around you about how much better their lives would be without you. Subtle and sometimes not so subtle reminders. Sighs. Stares. Rushing their children away when you pass nearby. Whispers. Pointing. He was, still is, he once told her, that mite in your tatami mat, that splinter burrowed in your finger.

  These are the few scraps of his life before coming to Nagashima that she knows, and she wishes he would tell her more. But she, too, has her secrets, things she has never told him, anyone. How this shore, for instance, across from Nagashima, is, at night, hers.

  ARTIFACT Number 0198

  A calligraphy brush

  All through the winter, she watches his breath as he paints.

  Man, forty-five. Boy, seventeen. Woman, thirty-five. Man, fifty-six. Man, forty-four. Woman, fifty.

  Sometimes, she can stand for as long as ten minutes before he acknowledges that she is there. She isn’t sure whether this is because of his deep concentration or his eyesight, which has nearly abandoned him. His face, inches from the surface. Inches from the slender brush, bristles bunched tightly together by the black ink, which has left miniature footprints on his glasses. He doesn’t have much of a surface to work on, the urn about the size of a small canister for storing green-tea leaves, smaller than his hands. Not much left after you burn a body for a couple of hours, she thinks. No matter how big the person, all about the same size when a pile of ash.

  Watches his breath as he paints.

  Girl, nineteen. Man, thirty-nine. Boy, sixteen. Man, fifty-five. Man, forty-three. Man, fifty. Woman, twenty-eight.

  It takes him about thirty minutes to paint each urn. An hour or two on some days. Then, for a week, none at all. She imagines that he must have been working nonstop back in 1934, when the Muroto typhoon crushed this area. More than 180 urns needed that late September. Patients, staff. The raw beauty of typhoons and how they don’t discriminate.

  His breath as he paints.

  Woman, forty-six. Man, forty-two. Man, fifty. Woman, fifty-one. Man, fifty-five. Man, forty-one. Man, forty-seven. Woman, fifty-nine.

  A kerosene heater at his feet. Sometimes he bends over and warms his hands near it. The hands, which, when he laughs and claps them together, clap only with the heels of the palms, the stumps of his fingers never getting involved. He twists his wrists side to side, up and down in front of the heater. Does this for a while, and then his breath appears once again when he moves away from the heater and back to the table.

  Man, fifty-one. Girl, eighteen. Man, forty-eight. Man, forty-two. Woman, forty-one.

  He was one of the first patients back in 1931, and he started painting when, later that same year, Mr. Nakahara, the original painter of urns at Nagashima, died. He pushes his thick glasses against his twisted face and squints real hard before acknowledging her for the first time.

  “One thousand two hundred and fifty-one.”

  This is how Mr. Oyama, the Nagashima urn painter, greets people. Says this as he works his way around the grounds in his wheelchair, or in his room when you enter, or here in this shack outside the crematorium. And for the rest of this day, he will greet everyone with “One thousand two hundred and fifty-one.” Unless, of course, someone dies; then his greeting will have a number added to it, but only after the urn is painted.

  He turns back to his table, and today, like all the days of the past week, it is slow. He has two lines of urns, six in one row, four in the other, and one by one he paints them.

  Man. Man. Man. Man. Man. Man.

  Woman. Woman. Woman. Woman.

  He prepares for spring, which begins tomorrow, and it will be two months into it that she will turn twenty-four. Half of her urn is already answered; all he has to do is wait for her final number before he must paint.

  ARTIFACT Number 1002

  A pair of rubber boots

  His feet, nearly white, the skin like jellyfish, loose and falling off, leaving large patches of raw flesh exposed.

  “When are you going to ask for those rubber boots, Mr. Yamai?”

  “I know I have to, but the administrators don’t like us asking for things that are so basic. Besides, I don’t think they like the things we have been doing with the readings and stories.”

  “But it’s only a pair of boots. Other patients have boots.”

  “Those are the orthopedic boots. It’s as if they are punishing those of us whose disease hasn’t progressed.”

  “Go and ask for the boots.”

  ARTIFACT Number 1012

  From the bookshelves at Nagashima

  Pai Miu is sick. The Master went to see him and, holding his hand through the window, exclaimed, “Fate kills him. For such a man to have such a disease! For such a man to have such a disease!”

  —sixth century B.C., China, when Pai Miu, a disciple of Confucius, dies of what is believed to be leprosy

  Those suffering from ta feng have stiff joints; the eyebrows and beard fall off.

  The wind scatters throughout the muscles and comes into conflict with the wei chi, or defensive force. The channels being clogged, the flesh becomes nodular and ulcerates. And because of the stagnant movements of this defensive force, numbness results.

  The vital spirits degenerate and turn cloudy, causing the bridge of the nose to change color and rot, and the skin to ulcerate. The wind and chills lodge in the blood vessels and cannot be got rid of. This is called li feng.

  For the treatment of li feng, prick the swollen parts with a sharp needle; let the foul air out until the swelling subsides.

  —from Nei Ching by Huang Ti (600 B.C.)

  garlic used with marjoram cures the lepras;

  mustard with red clay is used against the lepras;

  nettle in wine cures the facial lepras;

  wine sediment is rubbed in against the lepras;

  boil the root of scammony in vinegar to the consistency of honey, with which the lepras are rubbed;

  fat of the porpoise carries away the lepras.

  —ancient folk medicines for leprosy

  Patients were segregated in leprosaria in Europe in the Middle Ages. Leprosy became know as “the living death” where funeral services were conducted when a person contracted the disease declaring their death to society. Leprosy sufferers had to walk on a particular side of the road, according to the direction from which way the wind was blowing; some areas required them to wear special garb, wear a declaration sign around their necks and to ring a warning bell announcing that they were “lepers” from which people should flee. Other discriminating laws of the church and state required that use of separate seats in churches, separate holy water fonts and in some cases in Britain they had a “lepers’ slot” in the church wall through which the “leper” may view the communion service but not “contaminate” the service by his or her presence.


  —from Leprosy in Theory and Practice,

  by Drs. R. G. Cochrane and T. Frank Davey

  The WHO—at the fifth International Leprosy Congress in Havana, Cuba in 1948—recommends that sulphone (Promin) should be a major treatment for leprosy. It is accepted that temporary isolation might still be necessary, although for infectious cases only. The committee suggests that ambulatory and domiciliary treatment could be safely and satisfactorily given to most patients. Leprosy has ceased to be a “special” disease, and has simply become a disease for which early diagnosis and treatment of cases were recognized to be essential.

  —from World Health Organization reports

  It is necessary to have laws which make it possible to force leprosy patients to be contained in sanatoria even if it is against their will. Sterilization is a good way to ensure that the disease will not be transmitted among family members. To escape from a sanatorium should be made a crime for patients and as such be punished.

  —Dr. Kensuke Mitsuda, testifying before

  the House of Councilors’ Public Health Committee, 1951

  ARTIFACT Number 0983

  An old map of Honshu

  The last visitor she will ever have comes in the spring of her fifth year at Nagashima.

  She appears nervous, perhaps still stinging from the memories of her sister’s visit the summer before. They sit in the same room, at the only table. Her uncle Jiro is a short, compact man, much more like her than her sister.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “I feel fine. I do.”

  “You are no different from the way I remember you. How long has it been since I’ve seen you?”

  “New Year’s, six, maybe seven years ago.”

  “Your mother and father say hello.”

  She knows this isn’t true, knows that her parents are unaware of this visit, knows it more than anything in her life. Still, she manages.

  “Thank you. I say hello, too.”

  He says nothing. She looks at him and remembers, leaving traces of a smile.

  “What are you thinking about?”

  “About our trip to Mount Fuji. It is one of my best memories of . . .”

  “Of what?”

  She turns away before answering.

  “Just one of my best memories.”

  “I went again last year and I often thought of our trip there.”

  And they return to their silence. Maybe at this moment, he, too, is thinking of that trip more than a dozen years before. She is.

  The year she turned nine, he had promised to take her with him on his triennial climb of the country’s greatest mountain. The year she turned nine. It was her first time on a train. First time ever, even to see one, other than in a picture. The trip was long, most of the day and all of the night, her head resting against Uncle Jiro’s shoulder, his against the wooden-shuttered window. She slept little, surrounded by the trundling of the train through the night, flickers of red lights inside the cabin. At first, and for quite a while, she had thought them to be lightning bugs, and it wasn’t until her uncle awoke and lighted a cigarette that she realized they weren’t.

  She was fascinated that all of it, all that she had seen during the day and all that had passed unseen in the night, was her country. Startled her. So much more than the sixty-square-mile, galloping headless horse–shaped island of hers. Her uncle had bought her a map, and as they passed by towns and through stations and cities, she marked the journey. But when the sun rose the next morning, there was a large gap between Yokaichi and Fuji Station. She would not fill in that part until the return trip, felt that until she saw it with her own eyes, during the light of day, saw them actually passing through the towns and cities and stopping at the stations, seeing the signs with her own eyes, that until she saw this, she wouldn’t have really been there.

  It was not one of those beautiful clear days like she had seen in pictures of Mount Fuji—a stray cloud hovering majestically over the cone—but cloudy and humid. She could see halfway up the mountain, and her uncle must have noticed her disappointment.

  “The weather changes by the minute on Fujisan.”

  They continued on, but it seemed that the mountain never got closer.

  “When do we get to Fujisan?”

  “We have been on Fujisan for the past three hours. All of this wonderful farming land here was given to us from the gods of the mountain. We will spend the night up here near the base. Tomorrow, we do the real climbing. More than twelve hours.”

  They spent the night at an old temple, which her uncle told her was for mountain worshipers. He told her how the mountain was divided into ten stages and it wasn’t all that long ago that women hadn’t been allowed to climb past the eighth stage. The true climbers of Fujisan loved the mountain, he told her, and they believed that gods and ancestral spirits lived in it—not only Fujisan but all of the mountains in Japan—and they spent all winter inside the mountain, and in spring they descended to protect the rice paddies, and after harvest they returned to the mountain.

  “Will we see any of these gods, Uncle Jiro?”

  “You have seen them with every rice plant and tree you passed today. They are in here sleeping with us tonight.”

  Their climb began after a long lunch of barley, mountain vegetables, dried mackerel, and green and brown tea. They climbed and climbed, the view hidden by the trees. She would get glimpses of the sky, a beam of sunlight, but never a complete view. Her initial uneasiness that she was walking on a volcano abated a long time before they reached the timberline at eight thousand feet, seven hours later, night rushing at them. They sat and rested a couple of hours, ate dinner. She was amazed that, after being surrounded by them all day, not a tree was around them. Barren. Rocky. Dark. Lifeless.

  “All of this is lava and lapilli.”

  She wanted to ask what lapilli was, but she let the word dance around in her mouth, liking the sound of it, liking not knowing what it meant, the mystery of it.

  “Why isn’t it hot?”

  “This is an old volcano. There hasn’t been an eruption here for more than two hundred years. If you go to the island of Kyushu, you will find many volcanoes that are active and very dangerous. Some of them have gases that can kill people. Fujisan has no gas or steam, no earthquakes.”

  “It’s a big mountain.”

  “Fujisan is three mountains.”

  “Where can I see the other two?”

  “You can’t. We are sitting on Shin Fuji, and its eruptions have covered the other two volcanoes. You must always remember to check below the layers of things to find the truth.”

  When they began the ascent at the sixth stage, it was cold, and it grew colder and colder, much more than the winter winds off the Inland Sea. But the stars were huge and helped deflect some of the cold from her thoughts. So big and bright that at times they could have been seen through thin layers of clouds. She held her uncle’s strong, rough hands—rough as, but not as sharp as, the lava rocks they climbed on. Well before the top, she was more tired than she could ever remember, her legs lifeless. Maybe it was the altitude, so they stopped for a while. Other climbers huffed past them, puffs of breath seen as if they themselves were tiny volcanoes emitting steam on this volcano without it. She knew that her father was right, correct when he had told his brother that she was too young and would never make it, only hold him back.

  “She’ll make it,” Uncle Jiro had said defiantly.

  If her uncle hadn’t placed his knapsack on her back and lifted her atop his, she never would have made it. She knew it then, would know that biting truth for the rest of her days. But he did pick her up, and over the next fifteen hundred feet and two hours he carried her. The weight of the pack pressed her into her uncle’s back, his chicken wings hurting her chest, but she dared say nothing, for the pain was far less than the lifeless legs. And he pushed on, sometimes above the clouds, sometimes in them, below them. One of her great memories and disappointments of that trip was how she ha
d believed that the clouds were so puffy and soft, but they turned out to be nothing more than moisture. But when they were below and above her, she could be taken back to those memories, believing they were still puffy and soft, although she knew differently. And how the weather changed so quickly, how it was like she had fallen asleep in September and awoke in February.

  He helped her off his back, returned the knapsack to his shoulders, took her hand, and made her walk the final few minutes to the summit. At the top were many people, many more than a hundred. Her uncle pointed out the new meteorological observatory, which had opened the month before. It was still night, stars large as clamshells. Her uncle wrapped her tightly in his arms; she drew warmth from him, despite the wind tearing through her body. It was so quiet up there; few people spoke as the sky began to shed the night. Different layers, shades of blues and reds and oranges. Beams led the sun into morning. Uncle Jiro lifted her, propped her atop his shoulders, and that is how they said a prayer facing the sun—the June 9, 1938, sun. The stars were still clinging to the night above their heads.

  “You are closer to the stars than anyone in this whole country.”

  “What about all the other people, Uncle Jiro?” She pointed around.

  “We are also very close, but you are atop my shoulders, so that makes you the closest.”

  And although she didn’t know it at the time, this is the thought that pointed her in the direction of the sea and pearl diving. She knew that she could rarely be at the highest point in her country, but if she dove, she could be lower than anyone else in Japan. And that is what pushed her those few feet farther into the sea than the other divers. Lower than anyone else in the country.

  Uncle Jiro had said that he would take her again to Fujisan on his sixtieth birthday, the time when a person’s second cycle of life begins. But I am here, she thinks, and it is my twenty-fourth birthday and he is sitting across from me in all this silence. And how old is he? she thinks. Will he still return to Fujisan on his sixtieth birthday even without me?