Example essays · Japan

Japan

Two example essays on the novel, each modelled on one kind of final-year task set in Japan.

About these essays. They are example essays written for this site, in the voices of imagined students; they are not the work of real pupils. They discuss the whole novel, including the ending, so each one stays hidden until you say you have finished the book. Every quotation is checked against the paperback, and page numbers refer to it.

In Japanese upper-secondary schools, the “Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study” (sōgōteki na tankyū no jikan) asks students to choose a question, investigate it over a year or more and present the result, often as a structured research report; schools with international or global courses frequently have it written in English, with a length that varies from school to school. Essay 1 imitates such a report, with the numbered sections and short reference list that teachers expect. Essay 2 imitates a high-school graduation thesis (sotsugyō ronbun) in English on the literature track, a longer reflective piece with an introduction (hajime ni), numbered chapters, a closing section (owari ni) and a list of works cited. The students and their schools are fictional.

Example essay 1

Who Holds the Key? Water, Trees and Land as Commons in Songs of Dust and Water and in Japan’s Iriai Lands and Irrigation Districts

Written as: An imagined student aged 17, third year, global course at a prefectural high school in the Saku area, Nagano Prefecture
Format: Period for Inquiry-Based Cross-Disciplinary Study (sōgōteki na tankyū no jikan), final research report, written in English
Task: Choose a work of literature from outside Japan and investigate one social or environmental question it raises, using at least one academic source and one comparison with Japan. Present your findings as a research report.
Length: 2,751 words, not counting headings and references

Hidden until you have read the whole book, including the vote and the ending.

1. Research question

How does the village of Nafawol in M.J. Hydara’s novel Songs of Dust and Water (2026) manage its water, trees and land as shared resources, and how does its system compare with two Japanese ways of managing commons: iriai common lands and satoyama, and the land improvement districts that run farmers’ irrigation?

I want to answer a smaller question inside this one as well. In everyday Japanese we often use “shared” (kyōyū) loosely, as if anything that is not private must belong to everyone. I wanted to find out whether the novel separates different kinds of “shared”, and whether those separations match the ones that Japanese villages made over several hundred years.

2. Background

2.1 The novel

Songs of Dust and Water has two parts. Part One, set in the fictional Republic of Awdagha, tells how a solar and water plant in the village of Madina is built by an outside fund, taken over by a minister and destroyed by fire. Part Two, “The Water-Keeper”, is set ten years later in the fictional Republic of Tekuru, on a floodplain that the river has abandoned. The well at Nafawol has been turning salty for six years. Dr Arramata, an engineer born in the village, brings an air-water harvester paid for by the Proxima Fund, and the village slowly builds a road, a mill, a common fund and finally a union of villages. In Year 7 the union refuses a very large offer from a company, TransGlobal Agriculture, by a vote with stones. Page numbers below refer to the paperback.

2.2 Iriai and satoyama

In Japan, iriai means the right of the people of a village to use land together, usually forest or grassland on the mountain, for firewood, grass for fertiliser and fodder, thatch and wild plants. The land itself might belong to the village or to someone else; the iriai right is a right of use held by the community. The Civil Code of 1896 recognised iriai rights and left their details to local custom. After 1966 a national law encouraged villages to convert iriai land into modern forms of ownership, and much of it was divided or put into forestry associations.

Satoyama is a related but wider word. It describes the mixed landscape near villages: secondary woodland, paddy fields, irrigation ponds and grassland, kept in a particular state because people used them every year. When villages changed from firewood and charcoal to oil and gas in the 1960s, much satoyama woodland stopped being cut and became overgrown. In 2010 Japan’s Ministry of the Environment and the United Nations University launched the Satoyama Initiative at the biodiversity conference in Nagoya, to support landscapes of this kind around the world.

2.3 Land improvement districts

The Land Improvement Act (1949) allows farmers in an area to form a land improvement district (tochi kairyō-ku), a public body run by its members that builds, maintains and manages irrigation and drainage. In my own area the Gorobei Canal, about 20 kilometres long, was built in the early Edo period by Ichikawa Gorobei to bring water to the dry uplands of Saku. It is still managed by the Gorobei Yōsui Land Improvement District, and in 2018 it was registered as a World Heritage Irrigation Structure (Nagano Prefecture, 2025). When I was in the fourth year of elementary school, our class visited the canal’s intake, and my grandfather still goes out every spring with the other farmers to clean the channel.

2.4 Ostrom

Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (1990) argues against the idea that shared resources must be either taken over by the state or divided into private property. She studies communities that have managed commons for a long time and finds eight shared features, which she calls design principles. They include clearly defined boundaries, rules that fit local conditions, the right of users to take part in changing the rules, monitoring, sanctions that begin small and grow, cheap ways of settling conflicts, and recognition by the government of the community’s right to organise itself. One of her examples is three Japanese villages, Hirano, Nagaike and Yamanoka, which she describes using the research of Margaret McKean (1982). In these villages the community decided when the mountain commons could be opened for cutting, every household had to contribute labour, and villagers took turns to patrol the commons. People who broke the rules were fined, at first lightly, and the fine could sometimes be paid in sake. Ostrom’s point is that the rules were made and enforced by the users themselves.

3. Method

I used two methods. First, close reading: I read the novel twice and recorded every passage about who may use water, trees or land, who decides, and what happens when a rule is broken. I sorted these passages using Ostrom’s eight principles as categories. Second, comparison: I compared the results with the Japanese examples in section 2, using Ostrom’s book, Japanese government sources and an interview with my grandfather about canal work.

A limitation is that the novel is fiction. I am not judging whether Nafawol’s system would work in a real country. I am asking what distinctions the novel makes, and whether they are precise.

4. Findings

4.1 Water: the difference between a well and a machine

The first important distinction in the novel is made by Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper, before anything is built. She tells her friend Fatou: “A well has no gate. Anyone with a rope may draw from it. A machine like that is kept behind a fence, and somebody holds the key” (p. 92). Fatou answers with an example from her own trade: when one man owns the only lorry, “he’s kind all through the planting. At harvest he names his price” (p. 92).

I think this is the most precise sentence in the book about commons, because it separates two things that are easy to confuse. The old well is open access: there is no gate, and in the story there is also no rule about how much one person may take. The harvester is a closed resource with a key. Both are shared in some sense, so the useful question is who holds the key. When the agreement is signed, the answer is very concrete: the committee keeps the padlock (p. 101), and Fatou is given the key and puts it “in her purse, with her coins” (p. 101). The fifth clause says Proxima keeps a second key for ten years, and Mamadou comments, “In ten years a heifer is a grandmother” (p. 101). When Adam finally hands the second key back, Fatou says, “It was always ours. This is only the receipt” (p. 213).

The novel also separates two kinds of water. The harvester’s water is for drinking, the borehole goes down to “the deep water”, and Dr Arramata explains that “Every litre this makes is one we leave in the deep water” (p. 103). Earlier she refuses to pump deep water for salt removal because it “is the water your grandchildren should drink” (p. 90). This means the deep water is treated as a commons shared with people who are not yet born. In Year 8, when the borehole falls, the village rations the taps to two hours morning and evening, and Isatou ticks “off each compound’s buckets against the mouths Fatou had written beside its name” (p. 205). This is the first time the novel shows the village setting a limit for each household, and it happens only when the resource is in crisis.

4.2 Trees: inheritance, shared value and the “second harvest”

The green belt around Nafawol is managed in a way that is close to iriai. The ground for the shelter trees is first walked by the alkalo “with the seyfo, the district chief” (p. 108), so the boundary is agreed with a higher authority before anything is planted. Later, families plant fruit trees between the rows, “claiming pieces of the green belt for their children to inherit” (p. 126). So inside one common belt there are individual rights of use that pass down in families. Iriai land often worked in the same way: the mountain was shared, but particular rights, for example to cut grass on a particular slope, could belong to households.

The carbon credits are a different case, and here the committee makes its most careful distinction. Fatou says: “Cotton money belongs to whoever grew the cotton. This belongs to the land, and to everyone who carried stone for it” (p. 128). The cotton is private produce grown on improved land; the carbon value comes from work done together, so it goes into a trust. Mamadou adds the condition that the trust must be built “so that it does not need me to be honest” (p. 128). This is the reason for the rule that “no sum above the price of a young bull could leave the fund without three names on it” (p. 129), from three different households. Mamadou insists that the rule must include himself: “I want the rule to say no to him, so that I do not have to” (p. 129).

4.3 Land: the soil, the channels and the herders

After the ñan-kale, the public test field, the old farmer Ousman accepts the new methods but says to Dr Arramata: “The water is yours. The soil is ours. Do not confuse them” (p. 107). I find this sentence interesting because it is a boundary drawn by a user, not by the engineer. Knowledge and machines can come from outside, but the land stays under the village’s judgement.

The work on the dead river channels shows something else. Before the stone lines are built, Mamadou visits the herders’ camp, because “Their cattle had walked those dead beds since before the river left, and nobody had asked them about stones” (p. 126). He goes back “twice more before they agreed where the cattle would cross” (p. 126). In Ostrom’s terms, the herders are also appropriators of the channels, even though they are not members of the village committee, and the work cannot succeed without their agreement. The old men explain why they build lines that will only pay in ten or fifteen years: “‘For us,’ one of the old men said, and set another stone” (p. 126). Here the commons extends backwards in time as well as forwards.

4.4 Rules, monitoring and sanctions

Almost all of Ostrom’s principles can be found in Nafawol. Monitoring is done by putting the ledger on a wall every Friday. Isatou, who runs the women’s osusu, explains the idea with her own savings pot: “A pot everyone can see into does not empty in the night” (p. 132). When the banking inspector finds two errors, including a payment with only two signatures, she says: “If you let it be two when it is convenient, it will be two when it is not” (p. 138). The sanctions are graduated. Fatou’s own mistake is corrected with a line in the ledger and her full name. Lamin, Mamadou’s grandson, who takes small sums just below the three-signature line, must sell his motorbike and work off the rest, and his name and Mamadou’s are both written down.

The novel also touches Ostrom’s last two principles, though the seventh, recognition by the government, appears mostly through its absence. When the government’s safety inspector seals Sirawol’s mill boiler, Fatou says, “Sulayman cannot take the Fund … So he has taken the mill,” and Kadiatou corrects her: “He has taken the year” (p. 160). The villages then write a common charter, because, in Kadiatou’s words, “A rope of four strands is not four ropes” (p. 165), and in Fatou’s, a charter “would have stopped him choosing which of us he came for” (p. 165). This is close to what Ostrom calls nested enterprises, her eighth principle.

5. Discussion

5.1 Where Nafawol and Japan are similar

The strongest similarity is that the rules are made by the people who will live with the results. Proxima’s own rule says the money continues only while what is built belongs to the village and is run by its people. The Japanese villages in Ostrom’s book also made their own rules and patrolled the commons themselves. In both cases the rules are detailed and practical, for example the exact signature threshold, or the day the mountain opens.

The second similarity is with the land improvement district. Nafawol’s Coffer Fund is re-registered as “a village savings society under the banking law”, and later every village fund becomes a cooperative society inside a registered union. A land improvement district is also a farmers’ organisation given legal status by the state. My grandfather told me that the district’s office keeps the accounts, but the work of cleaning the channel is still done by the farmers together in spring, and a household that does not send anyone pays a small charge. This is a sanction, but a mild one, like Nafawol’s corrected ledger lines.

5.2 Where they are different

I found three important differences.

The first is boundaries. Japanese iriai villages had very clear membership: you used the mountain because you were a household of that village. Nafawol’s boundaries are open and keep changing. The union grows to thirty-one villages, and one village, Kerewol, repays its loan, sells its mill and leaves. The narrator says, “The charter allowed it, and nobody had been able to tell Kerewol it was wrong” (p. 225). I think this is a realistic detail. A commons that anyone may join must also allow members to leave, and leaving is harder to prevent than entering.

The second is the role of the state. Ostrom’s seventh principle is that the government recognises the users’ right to organise. The Japanese state recognised iriai in the Civil Code and gives land improvement districts legal status, although after 1966 it also encouraged the end of many iriai lands. In the novel, Tekuru’s state is suspicious. The minister tries to take control of the fund, and when the union is registered he replies that “the Republic knew of no place called Senebia” (p. 173). Nafawol survives mainly because it puts every paper in public and finds allies such as the banking regulator. The novel seems to say that legal recognition can come from one office of the state while another office is hostile.

The third difference is the hardest. Satoyama declined in Japan because people stopped needing it, after fuel and fertiliser could be bought. A commons that is no longer used is no longer maintained. In Nafawol the danger is the opposite: an outsider offers to pay for everything. TransGlobal’s offer would have given each family fifty thousand dollars, but the company would hold a veto over large investments and the first right to buy every bale. When Evelyn Reed of TransGlobal offers to help the union grow faster, the reply is short: “With whose hand on the key,” Kadiatou said (p. 187). It repeats her first distinction about the well and the fence. The vote of fourteen to ten refuses the offer, and the novel shows the costs honestly: a student loses a year, a family leaves for the coast, and the hospital is never built. In the novel the village keeps the key and pays for keeping it, and I do not think the book claims more than that.

5.3 The meaning of “shared”

My smaller question was whether the novel separates kinds of “shared”. I found at least five: open access with no gate (the old well); a closed commons with a key held by a committee (the harvester); a resource shared with future generations (the deep water and the stone lines); private use inside a common area (the fruit trees in the green belt); and value created together and held in trust (the carbon credits). Japanese practice also made several of these distinctions, for example between the iriai mountain and the private paddy, or between the canal that the district maintains and the water each field receives in turn.

6. Conclusion

Nafawol manages its water, trees and land through rules that its own people write, check in public and enforce with graduated sanctions, which matches most of Ostrom’s design principles and is similar to Japanese iriai villages and land improvement districts. The novel is especially careful about distinctions. It does not treat “common” as one thing, and its most important question is always who holds the key. It differs from the Japanese cases in its open boundaries, its difficult relationship with the state, and the fact that its main danger is a generous buyer rather than abandonment.

Through this research I understood that the canal my grandfather cleans is not public in the way a road is public, and not private like our field. It is held by the people who use it, under rules they agreed to. I had never had a word for that before. In future I would like to interview members of a land improvement district about how decisions are made at their meetings, and compare them with the council scenes in the novel more exactly.

References

Hydara, M.J. (2026). Songs of Dust and Water (paperback, ISBN 9798162251088).

Land Improvement Act (Act No. 195 of 1949), Japan.

McKean, M. A. (1982). The Japanese experience with scarcity: Management of traditional common lands. Environmental Review, 6(2), 63–88.

Nagano Prefecture, Saku Regional Development Bureau. (2025, September 5). Press release on the Gorobei Yōsui learning session [in Japanese].

Ostrom, E. (1990). Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action. Cambridge University Press.

Ministry of the Environment, Japan, & United Nations University Institute of Advanced Studies. (2010). The Satoyama Initiative.

Interview with my grandfather, a member of a land improvement district in the Saku area (August 2026).

Example essay 2

The One Who Serves the Cup: Bearing Witness to Poisoned Water in Songs of Dust and Water and Ishimure Michiko’s Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow

Written as: An imagined student aged 18, third year, literature track at a private girls' high school, Kumamoto City
Format: Graduation thesis (sotsugyō ronbun), English literature track, written in English
Task: Choose a novel published outside Japan and write a thesis on one theme in it, in conversation with a work of Japanese literature. Your thesis should make an argument through close reading and show awareness of the historical background of the Japanese work.
Length: 2,969 words, not counting headings and references

Hidden until you have read the whole book, including the vote and the ending.

Hajime ni (Introduction)

My grandmother grew up in a fishing town on the Shiranui Sea, north of Minamata. She does not talk very much about those years. When I told her that my graduation thesis would compare a new African novel with Ishimure Michiko’s Kugai Jōdo, she was quiet for a while, and then said that when she was a girl, people stopped buying fish from the coast, and that people from her town learned not to say where they came from when they went to the city. Then she asked me to write carefully, because many of the people in that history are still alive. I have tried to remember this on every page.

M.J. Hydara’s Songs of Dust and Water (2026) is not about industrial pollution. Its poisoned water comes from a well on a dry floodplain in the fictional Republic of Tekuru, which has turned salty and bitter because the river left long ago. Nobody put the poison there. Still, the first chapter set in Nafawol contains a confession that I could not stop thinking about while I read Ishimure. Kadiatou, the Water-Keeper of the village of Nafawol, thinks: “This water is slow poison, and I am the one who serves it” (p. 87).

In this thesis I argue that Songs of Dust and Water treats bearing witness as something done from inside the harm, by the person who hands over the cup, and that the novel insists the witness must also record the costs of her own choices. I compare this with Ishimure’s way of witnessing in Kugai Jōdo, which was also written from inside a community. I also try to show where the comparison does not fit, because the difference between a salty well and a factory’s mercury is important.

Chapter 1: “I am the one who serves it”

The opening of Part Two tells us that “The well had been going bitter for six years before anyone from outside acted” (p. 81). The next sentences change the meaning of “outside”: “Kadiatou had noticed in the first season. She had been the one to say so, in committee” (p. 81). So the first witness is the woman who draws the water, years before any engineer or fund arrives.

What surprised me is that Kadiatou does not describe herself as a victim or as a brave speaker. She sees herself as the one who gives the poison. “In the market, the women fall quiet when I pass. They do not accuse me” (p. 87). Nobody blames her aloud, and she hears the silence as blame anyway. Her granddaughter Mariam is weak from fever, and the narrator says plainly that the women of her compound “drew their water from the well that Kadiatou kept, and cooked with it, and gave it to their children, because there was no other water” (p. 86). The repetition of “and” makes the daily act feel endless.

Even on the morning of the confession she continues her duty. For the strangers who arrived the day before, she pours a bowl “because a guest is offered water and there was no other water to give” (p. 87). I read this sentence many times. Hospitality, which should be the most innocent act, has become part of the harm. Her witness is therefore uncomfortable: she cannot stand outside and point.

Kadiatou also explains her relationship to the old story of Wagadu, where a broken covenant made the wells go bitter. She has not decided about the snake in the well, but “I decided long ago that I believe the part about the water” (p. 87). I think this sentence is the key to her as a witness. She does not need a myth or a scientific report to tell her what she tastes every morning.

The novel also shows that a scientific witness was available and did not help. Dr Arramata, the engineer who was born in the village, says that she measured the floodplain for eleven years: “I published the figures twice. The second time I named the salinity exactly, and what it would do to children, and in what year. Nothing happened” (p. 89). She adds, “Nobody funds a study of a place nobody intends to visit” (p. 89). Knowledge existed, written down, and it was not enough.

This was the first point where I thought of Minamata. According to the Ministry of the Environment’s history (2002) and other accounts, Minamata disease was officially reported on 1 May 1956, but the government did not officially conclude that methylmercury from the Chisso factory was the cause until 26 September 1968. In 1959 the director of Chisso’s own hospital, Dr Hosokawa Hajime, had produced the symptoms in a cat fed with factory wastewater, and the company stopped his research. For twelve years knowledge existed and nothing decisive happened. Arramata’s “Nothing happened” is a very short sentence, but in Kumamoto it sounds long.

Chapter 2: Write everything down

The novel’s other model of witness is the written record. In Part One, after the Ministry of Energy has taken over the solar plant at Madina, the engineer Aisha telephones the minister who sent her. He cannot help, but he tells her: “Write everything down … Every warning. Every part. Every date. Keep a copy somewhere they cannot reach” (p. 44). That evening she buys a school exercise book from a stall by the well, writes until the lamp runs low, and then “wrapped the book in plastic and put it at the bottom of her duffel, under her clothes, where it stayed” (p. 45).

I want to point out two things about her record. First, it is honest about everyone, including the man she disagrees with. “On a page of its own she wrote that refusing the smith’s bracket had been sound engineering, and that leaving it in the dust without learning the smith’s name had not” (p. 44). She separates what was right from what was wrong in the same action. Second, the record does not win anything at the time. At the official inquiry, the committee reads out facts that are true, and the narrator says, “They had simply started the story where it suited them” (p. 63). The minister Khresay tells Adam, “Evidence is a goat. It goes where the man holding the rope leads it” (p. 66).

So why keep the book? The novel’s answer comes at the very end. The visitors from Madina arrive at Nafawol by train, and a woman among them, who can only be Aisha, leaves the exercise book in the academy library. Hassan explains that she “has kept it for nearly twenty-five years, because a minister in Bakoro told her to write everything down” (p. 231). Kadiatou asks to hear the first page, which contains “a line about setting a dish of grey paste on a clean table” (p. 231). The record reaches its reader a generation later, in another country.

In Nafawol the same idea becomes public. After Musa, the alkalo of Sirawol, confesses that men from his village broke Nafawol’s culvert, and Nafawol’s young guards have broken a Sirawol boy’s arm, Mamadou says: “Let it be written down … The culvert and the arm, and the names of the ones who did them, and the name of the man who paid” (p. 155). The man who paid is never charged, because “there was nothing anyone could prove in a court. But every trader on the floodplain could read the two records” (p. 155). I find this careful. The record cannot give justice, but it gives the truth a place where it cannot be quietly changed.

Kugai Jōdo is also a record kept by someone inside the community, but its method is quite different from Aisha’s. Ishimure (1927–2018) was born in Amakusa and lived in Minamata as a housewife and poet, not as a doctor or journalist. The book, published in 1969 and translated into English by Livia Monnet as Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow (1990), mixes reportage, documents and passages in the voices of patients and their families, much of it in the local dialect. Critics have discussed how far these voices are transcriptions and how far Ishimure composed them from what she heard and felt. I do not think I am able to judge this. But I notice that Hydara’s novel also contains both kinds of witness: Aisha’s dry list of dates, and the griot at the feast who sings the ten years and “left out nobody who had carried a stone” (p. 214). The novel seems to need the ledger and the song together.

I also want to note what Ishimure did with the recognition her book received. It was chosen for the first Ōya Sōichi Non-fiction Prize, and she declined it. I do not know all her reasons, so I will not guess. But it reminds me of Kadiatou, who will not open the new academy “with a ribbon and a speech” (p. 150), the way visiting officials do, and gives each student a millet seed instead.

Chapter 3: Handing over the cup

The confession in Chapter 10 is private, inside Kadiatou’s head. It becomes speech only in Year 7, when TransGlobal Agriculture offers the union of villages a huge investment, and her oldest friend Fatou wants to accept. Fatou’s argument is hunger: her mother cooked the seed millet in the famine years. Kadiatou answers:

“For six years … I drew water from that well every morning and handed it to children, knowing what it was doing to them, because there was nothing else to give them. Mariam. Your own sister’s boys. I did it every morning. Do not tell me I don’t know what it is to feed a child something that harms it because the other choice is nothing” (p. 193).

Then she says, “I have been the one who hands over the cup, and I will not have our grandchildren’s cup in another man’s hand” (p. 193).

This is the moment when her witness becomes an argument. She uses her own guilt as knowledge. Without claiming to have been innocent, she claims to know, from her own hands, what it means when the person who serves the cup has no choice, and she will not let the next cup depend on a company’s decision. She also says, “I am not fighting you for a word” (p. 193), which answers Fatou’s earlier “Not for a word” (p. 193), as if Fatou had called ownership only an idea.

Here the comparison with Minamata needs care. In Minamata, the fish that carried the poison were also the food and the work of the fishing families, and for a long time there was nothing else. I have read that some families continued to eat from the sea because the sea was their life. But the families did not cause the poison, and the company that knew more did not stop. Kadiatou is not the cause either; the salt is nobody’s crime in the novel. What I recognised was the cruelty of a situation in which the person closest to the victim is the one who has to hand over the harm. Hydara lets Kadiatou carry that and turn it into a reason. I do not want to say the people of the Shiranui coast should have done the same, because their situation was worse and not of their making.

Chapter 4: Fourteen to ten

The vote is cast with stones: white for accepting the offer, black for refusing. Kadiatou and Fatou, as founders, do not vote. The count is slow, and the result is “Fourteen to ten” (p. 200). The narrator’s next line is: “No one cheered” (p. 200).

I think this short sentence is the novel’s most honest witness. A weaker book would have made the refusal a victory. Instead Fatou says, “I saw my mother in this vote … Pounding the seed millet in the dark,” and then, “Tonight I am going to sit here and count what it cost” (p. 200). Kadiatou sits beside her and lets her count.

The costs are then shown one by one. Mariam loses her place to study in the south for a year. When she asks her grandmother to admit it was wrong, Kadiatou says, “It cost you a year … I will not tell you it did not. I will not tell you it was wrong either” (p. 204). A family, the Teranu, sells its bullocks and leaves for the coast. In Year 8 the borehole falls and the taps are rationed.

The scene I find hardest is the funeral of Jankero of Kumbawol, an old man who had asked Kadiatou how far away the promised hospital would be. His son receives her kola and says, “He asked you how far the hospital would be,” and then, “It is as far as it was” (p. 206). Later a girl carries water along the wall to the guests. When she reaches Kadiatou, “From the bench the elder son said the girl’s name, not loudly, and she went past to the woman on Kadiatou’s other side” (p. 207). The Water-Keeper, who once served the poisoned cup, is now the one person who is not offered water. “Nobody spoke to Kadiatou about the water” (p. 207).

The novel does not explain this. It does not tell us whether the son is right. It only records it, as Aisha would. On the lorry home, Fatou, who wanted the other result, gives her a bottle, “and Kadiatou drank it to the bottom” (p. 207). I think this is where the book’s idea of witness is clearest. To bear witness to a harm you chose to risk, you have to sit through the condolence and accept the water that is withheld as part of the record.

My grandmother’s memory of people hiding where they came from is about a different kind of silence: the silence put on victims by others. Ishimure’s book was written partly against that silence, when patients were isolated and their homes disinfected, and when families who sued Chisso in 1969 were harassed in their own towns. In 1973 the Kumamoto District Court ruled for the patients and found that the “sympathy money” agreement of 1959 was invalid. I do not want to compare Jankero’s sons with the people who turned away from Minamata’s patients, because their grief is real and their anger has a reason. But both stories show that a community’s silence can be a judgement, and that a witness has to be willing to stand inside it.

Chapter 5: The taste of nothing

The well recovers. The stone lines built across the dead channels bring water back in Year 10, and on the first cold morning Kadiatou tastes the well water: “It was still bitter” (p. 211). Then, in a paragraph of its own, “Less.” After that: “She stood with the rope in her hands and did not tell anyone” (p. 211). For five years “the rope had come up a little heavier every season” and “she had tasted the water every season, and told nobody” (p. 232). At the end, with her great-granddaughter Halima helping her pull, she tastes “Almost nothing. No bitterness. A little clay, far back” (p. 232).

At first I did not understand why the witness keeps silent at the moment of good news. I now think it is the same honesty as before. She spoke about the bitterness at once, in the first season, because people were being harmed. She does not announce the recovery until it is certain, because false hope can also harm people. Halima tastes the water and makes a face, “because to her it tasted exactly like the fountain” (p. 232). The best result of witness, in this novel, is a child who does not know what there was to witness.

I cannot write the same ending for Minamata. The sea there has been cleaned in many ways, and the international convention on mercury adopted at a conference in Kumamoto in 2013 carries Minamata’s name. But the people certified as patients, and the many who applied and were not certified, still carry what happened, and there are still lawsuits. My grandmother’s town does not have a Halima who has forgotten. Perhaps this is the main difference between the two books. Hydara’s novel can end with water that tastes of nothing. Ishimure’s book had to keep the taste.

Owari ni (Conclusion)

Songs of Dust and Water gives us several witnesses to poisoned water: the scientist whose figures were ignored, the engineer who kept her exercise book for a generation, the ledger on the wall that names the guilty and the corrected, and above all Kadiatou, who served the cup. I have argued that the novel places the strongest witness inside the harm, and that it asks this witness to record what her own choices cost, as in the vote of fourteen to ten and the cup that passes her by at Jankero’s funeral.

Ishimure Michiko also wrote from inside, as a neighbour, and her book has helped people outside Kumamoto to hear the patients of Minamata. The novel cannot be a simple mirror of that history, because its poison has no owner and its water returns. But reading the two together helped me understand why my grandmother asked me to write carefully. Neither book promises that the witness will be proved right. In both, bearing witness means writing down what happened, keeping the copy somewhere it cannot be reached, and staying in the room when people are angry with you.

The novel’s coda says that “One pair of hands can always be made to let go” (p. 233). At the well, Halima’s hands are on the rope below her great-grandmother’s. I would like to think that this is what a record is for: so that the next pair of hands knows what the rope was for.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my grandmother, who allowed me to write her words here, and my teacher, who lent me her copy of Kugai Jōdo.

Works Cited

Hydara, M.J. Songs of Dust and Water. 2026. Paperback, ISBN 9798162251088.

Ishimure Michiko. Kugai Jōdo: Waga Minamata-byō. Kōdansha, 1969.

Ishimure Michiko. Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow: Our Minamata Disease. Translated by Livia Monnet, Yamaguchi Publishing House, 1990; reissued by the Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 2003.

Ministry of the Environment, Japan. Minamata Disease: The History and Measures. 2002.

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