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a
man who was a high school band director
a Buddhist priest
three Christians
a fish market auctioneer
two government office workers and a policeman
five Koreans—a woman and four men
a sushi shop owner
two members of the Communist party
two coal miners
a train conductor
three nurses
seven farmers
two construction workers
one law student
and a pearl diver
    ARTIFACT Number 0196
A rusty farm sickle
    She sees the man with the sickle in his right hand, but she sees the same thing many times each day.
The patients, who are healthy enough, do everything here: gardening, fishing, nursing, teaching, constructing buildings. They are both patient and staff. So, yes, she sees him, but he doesn’t strike her as doing anything unusual or suspicious. Just walking by with a small sickle in his hand. Many people carrying or pushing all kinds of things: sickles, rakes, shovels, hand plows, wheelbarrows.
    He is not much older than she, maybe twenty-five, no more than thirty. She does know that he’s a newer patient and that, like her, he has almost no physical signs of his disease. He goes around without a shirt, not a mark on his torso, only the large red spot on his left hand. A spot that stands out even more because of how suntanned he is.
    She is up on the hill in Building A-15, giving Mr. Mimura’s legs a massage, when she hears screaming down near the sea, where most of the gardening is done. She goes to the window, doesn’t see anything, but continues to hear the commotion.
    “I’ll be right back, Mr. Mimura.”
    “Take me with you.”
    “I’ll only be a minute. I want to see what the screaming is about, that’s all.”
    “Take me.”
    She picks Mr. Mimura up from the bed—he’s like a bony bird, weighing not much more than her cedar tub filled with a day’s catch—places him in a wheelbarrow. Mr. Mimura’s been here since 1933, fifteen years before she arrived. He is in his mid-fifties, one of the oldest patients. She takes him outside and sees a large group of people running up the hill, carrying someone. She hurries toward them, nearly spilling Mr. Mimura out of the wheelbarrow. They rush on past and she follows them to the hospital. The man is bleeding profusely from his left arm, but it is all the mud mixed with the blood that keeps her attention. A muddy, bloody trail all the way up the path leading from the sea.
    It isn’t even fifteen minutes before the doctor comes out and says that the man has died, lost too much blood. The doctor tells several patients to carry the body over to the crematorium and dispose of it.
    She pushes Mr. Mimura back to the shed, but his gnarled hand punches at her arm.
    “Go down to the beach.”
    “Not today, Mr. Mimura. I have many things to do.”
    “Down to the gardens. Now.”
    Mr. Mimura is always polite and calm, and the only reason that she takes him down to the gardens is because his demanding tone is so out of character. It’s only up a little hill and down another, and it isn’t that hot, the end of April. There are a few people working in the gardens, and Mr. Mimura points for her to go off to the right, to the gardens closest to the beach.
    “Help me out of here.”
    She lifts him out of the wheelbarrow, helps him on those bird-thin legs over to where the potatoes are planted. Beside a large rock is a bloody sickle—like the sickle she saw the man with this morning—dried maroon by the sun. On the rock is the man’s left hand, the large red spot still on the back of it. She stares at the mountain that sits at the far end of the peninsula.
    “Help me back to the wheelbarrow.”
    She supports Mr. Mimura, lifts and sits him in the wheelbarrow, pushes him all the way up the hill, back down the other, past the shed and all the way around the small inlet to the other side of Nagashima.
    They still haven’t begun to cremate the man. Mr. Mimura, with her help, walks over to the naked body. She looks. Several scars on his right shoulder, scars whose history none of them