Leprosy and Constipation

Two of my favorite subjects.

Leprosy is the subject of a fine, short first novel by Jeff Talarigo, published in 2004. A young woman living on an isolated Japanese island in 1948, where she lives with her very traditional parents and works as a pearl diver, is diagnosed with leprosy, noted on the public records as dead, and moved into quarantine at a leprosarium on another island, only a short distance a way. She spends the rest of her life there, which seems to be at least 50 years (she is still alive at the end of the book).

The disease often proceeds very slowly, but there is no cure. The patients at this very spare facility all have jobs which help organize and support this communal facility. They get to know each other well, but only up to a point: they take new names and new identities.

The isolation is not complete, as mobile patients are allowed off the island for short excursions, and there is even a chance for dismissal into the community as medical assistance becomes more available, but Ms. Fuji (for that is the name she takes) decides against leaving. Why? Probably, because she would be too isolated. Her life as a pearl diver was isolated. Her life as a leper is isolated. In her few excursions back into society, she feels isolated. And the isolation of the leper colony, with all of its limitations and problems, perhaps seems the safest.

A very good book about a female Japanese leprosy patient in an isolated part of Japan starting in the 1940s by an American male who was probably not even alive when the book starts. How is it possible to set the stage, when the stage is so foreign to the writer?

Constipation was, I believe, the undercurrent of an 80 minute French silent movie (from 1923) which we saw this weekend. The apparently well known film, Coeur Fidele, by Polish/French avantgarde director Jean Epstein, is set in depressing Marseilles, on and around the docks, and centers on a poor orphan, who has two suitors, one of whom is handsome Jean and the other Little Paul, a gangster who nobody likes.

Paul and Jean get in a fight, and Jean goes to jail, leaving Little Paul without competition. Little Paul and our heroine get married, have a baby, live in poverty (because of his gambling and drinking), befriended by a poor, crippled girl in the apartment next door (played by Epstein's sister). Jean gets out of jail, finds his old flame, sees her at first secretly and then in the open, when another fight begins between Little Paul and himself. But Paul's gun falls on the floor, the neighbor picks it up and with shaking hands, shoots and kills Little Paul, whose head falls on the crib of his young son.

There are apparently some innovations here: kaleidescope designs, close ups, etc., which were apparently part of the maintstream counterculture of France between the wars.

But the most irritating thing to me (of which there were many), were the continual (i.e., without a single variation or break) scowls on the faces of all of the characters. I can only conclude that all of their problems were the result of their constipation.