August 15: Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow
By Ishimure Michiko, translated by Livia Monnet
The village of Yudō lies around a small bay bearing the same name. Here the sea is never angry except when a typhoon comes once or twice a year. [...]
The young people of Yudō had once had their own gathering place. A dilapidated wooden hut reeking of salt air stood not far from the village well. It was always empty, permeated with that quiet loneliness and resignation with which the old people in the village had long been familiar. Long devoid of village youth, the hut was nothing more than a lifeless, decaying structure.
Deserting the village in ever increasing numbers, especially after the outbreak of Minamata Disease, the young people settled elsewhere. They never came back. In spite of their efforts, the old fisherman could no longer initiate the succeeding generations into the secrets of their old profession. [...]
On February 7, twenty days after Old Sensuke’s death, I ran into another funeral procession in the village of Detsuki, about to submerge under the sea of mud generated by the road works.
It was the funeral procession of Araki Tatsuo, who was born in 1898. He was hospitalized in April 1955 at the Psychiatric Department of the Ogawa Clinic in the suburbs of Kumamoto City with severe delirium and died ten days later, without ever having returned to his family. Tatuso’s wife had to carry the double burden of her husband’s medical expenses and supporting her family. She visited him all the time, each time being reduced to tears while Tatsuo would fearfully shrink back from her, unable to recognize her.
A convoy of enormous trucks ran with a deafening roar through the midst of the desolate procession, splattering mud on the plain mourning dress of the participants, as well as the memorial tablet of the deceased, and even the bowl of rice to be offered to his spirit.
How different were the funeral processions in Minamata a generation ago! In all weather, they were always preceded by funeral banners of gold brocade or colored silk, and accompanied by musicians playing the flute and ringing the gong. Even the more modest processions were treated with reverence: as they advanced silently along the middle of the road, horse-drawn carts and motor vehicles would stop, pulling aside to let them pass by, while passers-by would bow their heads, joining their hands in prayer. Whatever the status of the deceased, the participants of the funeral procession were always dressed in impeccable formal kimonos, and their solemn bearing showed how deeply they were moved.
On that day in February 1965, the procession carrying the body of Araki Tatsuo to his burial place was forced to detour into the rice paddies lining the National Highway to make way for the column of monstrous roaring trucks. Araki was the fortieth victim of Minamata Disease who had died. His grave had been dug on a slope facing the sea. [...]
Like Lady Ch’i of the Han Dynasty [concubine of Emperor Kao-tsu who was tortured to death by Kao-tsu’s wife, Empress Lü], those who have died of Minamata disease were mutilated and died in atrocious pain. However their death was only apparent, for their ghosts still haunt this world, awaiting their time for revenge. If the inhuman crime of Empress Lü has won a conspicuous place in history, how much more so should the systematic annihilation of the Minamata fisherman by modern industry! It will not suffice to say that what Chisso did to those fishermen was just another form of the ruthless oppression of the working classes by monopolistic capitalism. As a native of Minamata, I know that the language of the victims of Minamata Disease一both that of the spirits of the dead who are unable to die, and that of the survivors who are little more than living ghosts一represents the pristine form of poetry before our societies were divided into classes. In order to preserve for posterity this language in which the historic significance of the Mercury Poisoning Incident is crudely branded, I must drink an infusion of my animism and “pre-animism” and become a sorceress cursing modern times forever.