This book is strong in character, story and language.

Summary:
A physically powerful young Japanese woman who exalts in the daunting challenges her occupation as a pearl diver present her in the Inland Sea off Schodo Island, overnight finds her whole world erased when she contracts leprosy and is totally shunned by her family who consider her disease a disgrace threatening both their livelihood and social standing. She is sent to the leper colony on the island of Nagashima and there is confronted by a medical staff who can offer in the first years only primitive treatment and its own rejection of her humanity. Ironically, she suffers from a form of the disease which destroys nerve function so she becomes insensitive to touch in some places on her body but her limbs and flesh outwardly remain whole. She responds positively to new drug treatments, but there is never any possibility offered that she might return to the outside world as a cured patient. Because the colony has been in existence decades before her arrival, she gradually assumes her place in a society of very ill people consigned by their sickness to live in complete isolation except from the medical personnel who run the colony.

This is a poignant story of a talented, sensitive woman whose physical strength and body size, both attributable to her diving, makes her mother scold her as unfeminine and therefore unmarriageable. Already marginalized from female society, she becomes a total pariah as a leper.

With the other patients in the colony, she establishes friendships, and in her assigned tasks develops a routine for getting through her days, months and years.

The book's spare yet powerful language coalesces into a series of short chapters named by the author as "artifacts." We are introduced to the pearl diver's friends among the patients and we follow her on her various assignments through the sanitarium and the island.

The book concludes in the pearl diver's last years when she has become an old woman. The patient population of the colony is dwindling and nearly all old. People have been allowed to visit the Mainland overnight in the pearl diver's final years since treatment has improved for leprosy and so many people have died.

She encounters, on her final trip to the outside world, a young man suffering from AIDS and glimpses an advent of a whole new epidemic that stigmatizes its victims in some ways very differently from leprosy though similar in the power that it has to isolate them.

I would recommend this book!

Why?
Quietly moving, this story makes the reader reflect on the power that fear of the unknown has to repress all human tenderness and compassion but how also, even in the most restrictive of circumstances, human beings build relationships from their common experiences. The author has written and published short stories, but this is his first novel. I will watch for his second.

Employee Initials: CL Review Date: July 2004

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