I loaned this one out to an old friend shortly after acquiring it. When I got it back, it had a little yellow Post-It note on the inside if the cover cover: "loved it", she had written. What else needs to be said? I'm leaving this little two-word review where I found it all those years ago.

While the prose of this novel are excellent and the structure original, the story is one of overwhelming sadness, and I was glad when I was finished. The story is set in post-war Japan and spans 40 decades of the life of a 19-year old pearl diver who is diagnosed with leprosy and is exiled to a leper colony on a small island not far from where she grew up (she can see her hometown island from her new home, Nagashima). She must change her name and takes on “Miss Fuji” for the island she climbed when she was 9 with her Uncle.

Her leprosy is a mild case and she is able to remain relatively healthy compared to the other patients on the island. She struggles to accept her new life and especially the loss of her diving which she loves most in life. While she makes friends and becomes quite useful on the island; eventually becoming a nurse there, her longing for her beloved diving never ends.

Talarigo does a wonderful job of letting the reader feel Miss Fuji’s full range emotions from anger to sorrow, to longing, and even that of joy and hope. She is a complicated character with contradictory feelings about things and people (like real people do) and I found that added much to being able to relate to her and feeling empathy for her.

Although this is a relatively short book, only 237 pages, it is not a light read. There are many themes to explore and consider, it would make a very good selection for a book club.
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Put this down about halfway through and went on to other things. I read Molokai,which tells a similar story, recently. The Pearl Diver is good, it just wasn't the right time for it. I'll be back.

A hauntingly beautiful book. She is a pearl diver. She goes into the sea, draws in a large breath and dives deeply for as long as the breath lasts. She loves the feel of the sea and hates the winters that take her from it. The spot on her arm is small. The cut across it is not painful. But her life is turned upside down when the policemen take her away. She is number 2645. She becomes known as Miss "Fuji". Her life in the sea is no more. ( )

People like to blame misfortune on its victims. When a sore on a young pearl diver’s arm is diagnosed as leprosy, she is chased down, declared dead, and confined to a small island populated by thousands of other patients. She stays there the rest of her life.

Miss Fuji, the pearl diver, meets her life’s trials –estrangement from her family, conflict with island administrators, personal doubt- with resignation. The treatment for the physical symptoms of her disease is available from the first months of her stay at the Nagashima leprosarium, but her society’s stigma against lepers cannot be treated by pill or injection and even being cured opens no doors back to mainland society for her. Although parts of her body remain dead to sensation, Miss Fuji feels stigma keenly, and the reader is kept hoping that time will find a cure for that, too.

In this gentle book, Talarigo describes prejudice, disappointment, and human frailty honestly, but his depiction is softened by the acceptance that changes in social attitude do not arrive quickly. There is little dialogue, but the reader won’t miss it: it’s almost unnecessary because Talarigo writes silence so well. This is a thoughtful literary exploration of the treatment of lepers in Japanese society.
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