(Courtesy of Random House)

Unless I illuminate myself
Like a deep sea fish
Nowhere would I find even a glimmer of light.

In Jeff Talarigo’s affecting debut novel, The Pearl Diver, a 19-year-old pearl diver faces a diagnosis of leprosy that threatens to obliterate her life. When the authorities learn of her diagnosis, the pearl diver is promptly arrested, then forced into exile and intimate contemplation of the devastation her body must soon endure. Shipped off to the island leprosarium of Nagashima, the pearl diver loses everything  —  home, family, career  —  even her name. The name she chooses, Miss Fuji, evokes a treasured memory of climbing the mountain with her beloved uncle, the one relative who stands by her and will ultimately give her one of the greatest gifts of her life.

As a writer, Talarigo is above all a destroyer of myths. Glamorous images summoned up by the mention of pearl diving  —  slim, beautiful young women silently plunging into the deep sea  —  quickly dissolve. The work, as Talarigo describes it, makes “scarred, thick-bodied women.”

No amount of fresh water can wash the smell of the sea from the divers’ skins and even hot summer days will find their limbs half-frozen for hours. A descent of 60 feet under water contrasts strikingly with its corresponding ascent:  “Going down is like autumn into winter. Winter into autumn back up, but the thaw is very slow.”

Yet, the protagonist of the The Pearl Diver finds a deep satisfaction in her work that Talarigo captures in an early description of the act of diving:

“Her arms tight against her sides, her feet swept in slow, steady strokes; waves tossed and jolted her body, the water dimmer, duller, murkier with each foot she went. Sixty feet down, the light was that of an autumn’s half-moon. And down there, for the first time, she moved her arms from her side, doing handstands under water, feeling for the familiar.”

The shape of Talarigo’s story follows that of the dive itself. Miss Fuji’s new life will take her deep into darkness and find her fumbling blindly for strength, hope, and wisdom. She is on the verge of drowning before, at the last possible moment, she sweeps up into the light.

In Miss Fuji, Talarigo has created a character readers will be drawn to as moths to the flame. Never more than an ordinary Japanese woman, Miss Fuji’s fortitude and spirit enable her to endure almost unimaginable suffering and loneliness. She is luckier than many of her fellow lepers, for a new drug halts the disease’s progress through her limbs. But her luck will isolate her. Young and relatively vital, she spends her days caring for those whose bodies the disease has already ravaged. She has become both “parent and newborn,” “patient and staff.” A dual identity quickly begins to seem like no identity at all. She cannot fully share in the ordinary lives around her. The fisherman who first rows Miss Fuji to the leprosarium throws away the rice balls she gave him while she looks on. She is also alienated from the older lepers, who depend on her capable patience. And the sea, the love of her past life and a constant presence in her new life, at first seems lost to her.

From the other patients  —  Mr. Shikagawa, a tanka poet; Miss Minn, a storyteller; Mr. Yamai, the leader of a reading group; and others  —  Miss Fuji learns how to endure, but the relationships are always more complicated than that of mere teacher and student. This novel is no Karate Kid. Its pearls cannot be summed up with anything as simple as: “Wash on. Wash off.”

Relying upon only small words and simple gestures, Talarigo manages to suggest for each of his characters a rich inner life and a sense of life in its fullness. These are people who have lived, loved and suffered but continue to hope and desire.  

Talarigo doesn’t have quite the same success with the leprosarium staff, but nor does he seek it. They are faceless monsters stricken with leprosy of the soul. Their unyielding dominance will brook no resistance and their cruelty betrays no ambivalence. Simple scenes convey the consequences of association with leprosy to far greater effect — a mother, terrified to lose her children, tears them away from the sea shore where they have been doing little more than waving to the pearl diver; a noodle shop goes out of business merely because customers will not frequent a space that has been contaminated by a leper’s visit.

The stigma of leprosy is so great that even as the medical community’s knowledge becomes more sophisticated and new drugs are developed, the Japanese practice of isolation and sterilization (though doctors had known since the early 20th century that leprosy was not an inherited disease) continued and would not be formally discontinued until 1996. The stigma of the disease remains potent in present-day Japan.

Talarigo has chosen to structure the story around a collection of artifacts — money, a rusty farm sickle, maps, a tube of burn cream — each of which evokes specific episodes in Miss Fuji’s life, themselves evoking the stages of the leper’s life in 20th century Japan. Only at the end of the novel does the rationale behind the structure become clear, as the tale’s fictional narrator (and in this instance, archivist) reveals herself. The choice of structure enables the author to insert into the text general information about lepers, leprosy, and evolving treatment policies that place the lives of Miss Fuji and her fellows in historical and ethical context. However, frequent breaks in the text interrupt the narrative flow and create distance between the reader and the protagonist. The lives of the lepers take on a sense of inevitability and futility that somewhat muffles the story’s emotional immediacy, if not resonance. The story of the characters’ lives never erases, even for a moment, the fact of their imminent deaths.

Still, Talarigo’s prodigious accomplishment may be subversion of the convention of the sufferer’s tale, successfully uniting the truths of life and literature in a way that is not often possible. Talarigo does not reduce suffering to a mere external obstacle to be pushed aside or stepped over; it is, in life, the stake that directs the vine’s growth for better or worse. Miss Fuji’s suffering is part of her and it irrevocably transforms her.

Miss Fuji does find a life beyond suffering, but she can never fully overcome the effect of that suffering. The human spirit is no sword forged of adamantine steel, invulnerable to the elements, but a blade of grass, an autumn leaf or a cherry blossom, all easily crushed. Miss Fuji’s poignant victory at the end of the novel is very much her own, though she will never fully recover from the battle.

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The Pearl Diver

Excerpt from the book

Interview with the author and brief excerpt read by the author

Sierra Prasada Millman