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By Mariko Tatsumoto (Psych'74, Law'77) 
(Northampton House Press, 410 pages; 2024)
 

This elegantly told yet ultimately horrifying novel is based on the true story of one of history’s most shocking corporate betrayals and industrial disasters.

Yuki is the daughter of a poor fisherman. Kiyo is the son of a senior executive at Chisso, a huge chemical conglomerate. In 1956, they meet and become friends, then gradually fall in love. But then all living things in the once beautiful Minamata Bay suddenly die. The impoverished people living around it begin suffering from a terrifying disease that causes agonizing pain, paralysis, and death . . . including Yuki’s family. With no fish to catch and incapacitated from the disease, her parents are starving. As the sole wage earner, Yuki’s reduced to low-paying, backbreaking work as a laborer, then as a house cleaner.

The city-dwellers, who work at Chisso, turn their backs on the lower-class fisherfolk, who largely tend to get the disease. The corporation stonewalls, denying culpability. Kiyo fails to convince his father to get the company to help. As the suffering spreads, Kiyo helps researchers find answers to the devastating neurological disease. But they’re blocked by the government and the corporate-influenced media.

Together Yuki and Kiyo must fight both the Japanese government and a powerful and ruthless corporation to save her family and the bay.