At the far side of the garden, facing the back of the main house, was a workshop that had been built ten years after the main house. It was this small dwelling, with its large main room and small tub room, that had been O’Hara’s home during the two years he trained for his initiation into the shichi, the inner council, of the higaru-dashi, as well as his sanctuary during the long months of his recent exile.
The sweet smell of wisteria seemed to be everywhere as they entered the main gate and walked around the corner of the house toward the garden. And there was always a silence there, as if God had turned off the sounds of the world. He said good night to Sammi, thanked him and went around to the back to his place of peace, a sanctuary where he had retreated to consider his plight and make the decisions which had kept him alive during the long ordeal of the Winter Man.
From a group of trees near the doorway of the house, there were sounds; a twig cracking, a leaf falling, followed by a low, friendly ‘ruff.’
‘Hi, kids,’ O’Hara said to the big male akita dog, Kazuo-dan, and his mate, whom O’Hara had named Konsato, which means ‘concert,’ because when she was a puppy she bayed constantly: at the moon, the stars, the sun, the blossoms and anything else she could raise her head and howl at. The male, a large silver-gray dog, its tail curved up over its hindquarters, stepped out of the shadows to greet him. He was a regal animal, his bloodlines tracing back to a sire that was once guard dog to an emperor, and he carried himself with restrained elan. The female was more frivolous. She hopped about, licking O’Hara’s hands and nibbling Kazuo’s neck, which the male treated with a kind of annoyed tolerance.
He could sense Tana’s presence before he saw or heard her. There was a lacquered vase of white chrysanthemums in the tokonama which faced the door as he entered. She had prepared a snack of makizushi, tiny rolls of vinegared rice wrapped in thin seaweed and stuffed with asparagus tips and fish or seafood, and placed it on a low table near the sliding rosewood doors that led to the garden. His silk nightshirt was laid out beside hers near the futon on his bed.
Once inside, he could hear her singing softly, somewhere in the back of the house.
It was going to be difficult, telling her. He turned into the lavatory which was off a short hallway that led from the door to the main room. He slid the door shut and got out a straight razor and a mug of shaving soap and, after lathering his face, he shaved off his beard. As he shaved, his eyes kept drifting to the mirror and the reflection of the photograph of the Hichitani Chemical plant behind him.
It was a grim, dark, foreboding picture, showing the plant as a gray mass with tall stacks, lurking under an ominous tumour of polluted clouds. In the foreground, the polluted sky was reflected on the shiny ridges of the waves of the bay. The photograph was one of hundreds shot by the American photographer W. Eugene Smith, as part of an essay on the tragedy of Hichitani.
The plant was located on the shores of a nameless bay a few kilometres south of Minamata on southern Kyushu. Hichitani had been, for fifty years, the patron of more than seven hundred workers in this isolated village, and its only industry. There was no private enterprise in the village, except for the fishermen who lived there, and most of their boats were financed by the company. Hichitani provided the townspeople of Minamata with jobs, housing and a company store where they could buy food and clothing. Many of the men and women, whose grandparents had worked in the factory, had never been more than a hundred kilometres from the town where they were born. Its very isolation perpetuated the tragedy. Minamata was the culture for an epidemic of horror than spanned half a century.
The Hichitani corporation produced anodized aluminium — from raw materials to finished product. The effluent from its smelting plant was carried through long pipes and dumped into the ocean on the far side of a peninsula that protected the bay from the open sea. The prevailing tides, however, carried the sea water around the peninsula and back into the bay.
One of the chemicals in the raw effluent was mercury, an almost infinitesimal amount of mercury. But when mixed with water and catalysed by other chemicals in the waste, the mercury produced mercuric oxide, a deadly poison. The years passed and with each day, microscopic pearls of death drifted in with the tide and settled on the plant life and on the floor of the bay. The bay was a fisherman’s paradise, and the fish, the main food source for the village, fed on the plant life and ingested the deadly pearls from the water.
Decades passed. The mercuric oxide slowly infested the bay and its environment. Its effect on the people was gradual, developing over two generations. Then, in 1947, the plant doubled its capacity.
The first big fish kill occurred the following year, a year before the birth of the Matzashi child. Hundreds of tuna, sea bass and mackerel had drifted onto the beach of the bay. It was blamed on the red tide, and the incident was never reported to the press, but a few days after it happened, a group of engineers arrived from the main office in Ube, to study the fish kill. Hichitani later said their findings were inconclusive.
In 1949, the first deformed child was born and the effects of thirty years of pollution began to show. Nobody was too concerned about the Matzashi baby. After all, it was rumoured, the husband and wife were directly related. But two months later a child was born with no eyes, and then another with shrivelled, wasted legs, and another whose head was three times the normal size. Fourteen deformed children were born that year and five employees of the plant died of dysentery.
The scientists returned. Very quietly. On the team that was sent down the second time was Tasaguyi, a brilliant young chemical engineer. He moved to Minamata with Kenaka, his bride of less than a year, and set up an in-depth study of waste handling at the plant. Kenaka taught school. During the next three years, dozens of horribly deformed children were produced among the workers and townspeople who lived along the bay and fished its waters. Several of the older workers went blind, others died of a painful, kind of dysentery that killed or crippled its victims. The place seemed cursed, which indeed it was.
The first of the Tasaguyi children, Sashumi, was born in 1952. He was a normal but frail child Who was constantly ill. Tana, the daughter born the following year was deaf at birth. Ironically, it was Tasaguyi who detected the presence of mercuric oxide in the fish, the water and the plant life of the bay, but it was too late to help his daughter.
He sent the children back to Kyoto to live with their grandfather, and still believing the company would take drastic steps to save the village, and to prevent a panic, he quietly presented his findings to the board of Hichitani. The company announced it would build a new waste-treatment facility at the factory and a new water-treatment plant for the town, but still did not reveal to the people of Minamata the danger that lay at their doorstep. By then, there were hundreds of deformed children in the town, and dysentery was almost endemic.
Tasaguyi resigned, formed a citizens ‘group in the village and announced his findings to the press. A national scandal resulted. But a few months after beginning his crusade, Tasaguyi began suffering telltale cramps and diarrhoea. He kept up the fight. The cramps got worse. He began losing weight. Then he awoke one night desperately ill and died in agony eight hours later. Kenaka was determined to continue his fight, but she, too, was already terminally aff1icted with mercury poisoning. Kimura brought his beloved daughter back to Kyoto, where, for the last two months of her life, she was raving mad. He refused to commit hr to an institution and instead kept her locked in the workhouse, where he tended to her until she died.
