In Asian Waters



Jeff Talarigo: The Pearl Diver (Nan A. Talese, 2004)
Interviewed by Tara L. Masih




Tara L. Masih: When I read this novel after its release in 2004, I did a Web search to discover more about Jeff Talarigo, and found about two pages worth of hits. By 2006, as I prepared for this interview, the search turned up over 15,000 hits, in many languages. Talarigo is now winner of the Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters (for “fiction work of considerable literary achievement”) and was on the New York Public Library’s list of Best Books for the Teen Age. The book’s many glowing reviews use words such as “luminous,” “exquisite,” “hypnotic.” The story of Miss Fuji, a young pearl diver who contracts leprosy in 1948 Japan and is exiled to the island of Nagashima, has been translated into three other languages and has obviously struck a universal chord.

Talarigo, a former journalist, turned to fiction after living in a Palestinian refugee camp. His writings portray the disenfranchised, the outcasts we choose to overlook, and encompass everything that is human—the triumph in simple connections we make with people, despite the damage we can do to each other, and the triumph of survival in a world that is both hostile and renewing. Humankind’s history is played out as if it were the relentless tide of the ocean itself, which has its own role in framing and defining this empathic story.

TM: You capture so much of what the ocean is like below its surface—its temperature, light, sounds (the echo of divers’ picks). Did you do any diving yourself to prepare?

Jeff Talarigo: I did a lot of research and tried recreating the whole environment.  I have never been scuba diving—actually, I can barely swim—however, back in 2000, I went to Maui and snorkeled for the first time and I loved it. Of course, the marine life was tremendous, but what really left me in awe was that this immense body of water was also so fragile. Only when I saw the ocean “up close,” when I was able to glide above and touch the coral, did I understand this.

TM: When you began writing, were you aware of the irony that would lend itself to the story by creating a patient who was capable of escaping the island at any time, by swimming away?

JT:  As I was doing research for the novel, I read or heard that a pearl diver was one of the patients at Nagashima Leprosarium. The first time I stayed at Nagashima, in the summer of 2001, I asked many of the patients if they knew of a pearl diver, and no one had. Still, I kept a pearl diver as the main character in the novel because I liked the image of this woman, who is so close to her home island (five or six miles from Nagashima), but she can never return. 

TM: At one point, the fishermen of Nagashima are accused by the locals of contaminating the waters of the Inland Sea. How was this being done?

JT: The locals, in their ignorance about the disease and their prejudice against the patients, accused the fishermen at Nagashima of contaminating the inland sea with leprosy. This banning of fishing by the patients actually did happen back in the 1940s into the 1960s. From the time that Nagashima opened in 1931, until well into the 1950s, the island was, for the most part, self-sufficient. The patients did everything from building their own living areas to gardening, all the time dealing with this terrible disease they had been inflicted with.

TM: What is the state of pearl diving and fishing in that area today? I believe pearls are now
farmed ...

JT:  Nonexistent.  As you say, pearls are now farmed, and as I talk about late in the novel, when Miss Fuji leaves Nagashima, pearl diving has become this huge tourist industry in Japan where they even have this ridiculous “Pearl Diver Beauty Contest” every summer.

TM: Did living on the island of Kyushu lend any insight into the island life of Nagashima?

JT: The island of Kyushu is quite large, bigger than the state of Maryland, so this led to no real insight into island life. Nagashima, however, is about a mile long and less than half a mile wide and it wasn’t until I went there and walked the island and saw the trees and the view of the inland sea from the patients’ shoreline and the harbor and the original buildings that are still there, only after this did I know that I could write a novel on this place and these people. Some writers do not need to physically see a place to write about it, but not me; thus my time spent in Gaza and along the North Korea-China border, in pursuit of settings for my novels.

TM: To Miss Fuji, the sea is like a second skin. It’s your second novel—correct?—that will be set along the Tumen River on the North Korea-China border. Is it a coincidence that water will once again be the conduit for your story?

JT: And my third novel, which I am working on now as a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, is on the Palestinians, and much of this novel takes place in Gaza, which, of course, is along the Mediterranean Sea. In all these places where my novels take place—Nagashima, Gaza, the North Korea-China border region—I have been struck by how much natural beauty there is amidst all this horror. An example of this is Beach Camp in the Gaza Strip, which abuts the Mediterranean. I used to stand along this wonderful swath of beach looking out on the sea, but just behind me, fifty yards away, is this wretched refugee camp of over 70,000 people. I had similar experiences at Nagashima and along the Tumen River in China.  

TM: I experienced the same thing at the Taj Mahal. I think you capture this so well, the yin and yang of human experience. So, near the novel’s end, we are in the ’90s, and Miss Fuji, as you mentioned, is forced to witness the commercialism and exploitation of her ancient profession. What do you believe has happened in our modern society to the relationship between humans and the ocean?

JT:  Before moving to New York City this past July, I lived in Japan for nearly fifteen years and I was always saddened, by how, from afar, Mount Fuji or Beppu Bay on the island of Kyushu are magnificent, but as you draw closer to them, the destruction by humans becomes apparent; garbage, filthy water, etc. A few years ago, my son and I were at a campground along the Inland Sea in Japan, a really nice place, but there was this strip of beach and along it was a sofa, old tires, plastic bags. A woman was standing next to me, looking out onto the inland sea, and she said how beautiful it was, but I kept on seeing the garbage on the beach, while she was able to ignore it. I think that people have the tendency to ignore the damage we are doing to the oceans . . . and they focus on the beauty. This is fine, to focus on the good and not the bad, but I think that in order to take better care of these places, to preserve them, we need, at times, to pay more attention to the garbage on the beach.

Talarigo’s second novel is about the plight of North Koreans who have escaped their country by crossing the Tumen River into China. The story is narrated by a Chinese ginseng hunter and a North Korean prostitute whom he befriends. The Ginseng Hunter (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday) is scheduled to be released in April 2008.



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Tara L. Masih is a writer and editor living in Andover, Massachusetts (www.taramasih.com). Her fiction, poetry, and essays have appeared in numerous anthologies and literary magazines, and she has two flash fiction chapbooks published by The Feral Press. Her poem “Paumanok Today” appeared in the Autumnal 2006 issue of Sea Stories.