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Michiko Ishimure has often been referred to as the "Rachel Carson of Japan." Her best-selling book Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease (1972) helped alert the world to the dangers of industrial pollution. Her activism on behalf of the victims of Minamata disease placed her at the forefront of the environmental movement in Japan. She is the author of numerous collections of essays and poetry, novels, historical accounts, and a Noh drama. She has been awarded several literary prizes, including the Asahi Prize in Japan. A seventeen-volume collection of her works is now in publication.
The excerpt below is from her 1997 novel Lake of Heaven, which tells the story of a mountain village that is destroyed in the process of dam construction. It deals with the struggles of the villagers to recover and renew their local traditions, stories, and dreams in the face of displacement and modernization. Although the work can be roughly classified as a novel, it is written in Ishimure's pioneering mythopoetic style that merges storytelling, myths, and social commentary, with a particular attention to the world of sounds, nature and dreams. Gary Snyder has described Lake of Heaven as "a remarkable text of mythopoetic quality-with a Noh flavor-that presents much of the ancient lore of Japan and the lore of the spirit world-and is in a way a kind of myth-drama, not a novel." The story becomes a parable for the larger world, "in which all of our old cultures and all of our old villages are becoming buried, sunken, and lost under the rising waters of the dams of industrialization and globalization."
In this scene from chapter 5, "secret Song," the villagers are gathered by the shores of the dam-constructed lake that has submerged their old town, Amazoko. An older woman, Ohina, is helping her daughter Omomo take over the sacred ritual responsibilities for the village, hoping to preserve the ancient traditions that had been in danger of being lost when Sayuri, the former miko shrine maiden, died recently. Masahiko is a young man who has recently come to Amazoko from Tokyo for the first time. He had simply planned to spread the ashes of his deceased grandfather, Masahito, on the lake and then return. He ends...