Disease Disgust Through ‘the Ursprung of Pollution’

Disgust is a sensation developed to avoid pathogens. It is developed as an instinct to avoid disease. However, this is limited to ‘disease’. Martha Nussbaum divides aversion into two parts: ‘original disgust’ and ‘projective disgust’. The hatred of the original objects was called ‘original disgust’ and the expansion of people or groups from the original to other objects and considering them as harmful and dangerous ‘pollution sources’ was called ‘projective disgust.’ This study aimed to examine the problem of disease aversion through Ishimure Michiko's novel “Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow” which deals with Japan's representative pollution diseases such as Minamata disease. This text is a monumental work in many ways, including pollution literature, record literature, women's literature, and ecological literature. Through this review, I confirmed in the text how the emotion of “disgust” works within the individual, how it is transferred, and how it expands to group and group to group. What I wanted to reveal through this was the Minamata people as ‘being who is okay to hate’. I think Ishimure would have liked to rewrite the story in Minamata, in “the ursprung” and start again. “Paradise in the Sea of Sorrow” can be established as an “anti-hate novel” that resists stereotypes, prejudice, and discrimination by revealing social stigma and disgust.