A Visitor to a Museum 1989

In a bleak, post-apocalyptic landscape born from a global environmental disaster, the remaining humans drift through a century that seems to have forgotten the planet they inhabit. Among them exists a caste known as the “degenerates,” people whose intellectual challenges stand in stark contrast to the rest of the population. The story follows the life of the main character as he travels toward the sea, a vast body that periodically spills over its shores and then recedes, revealing a promise of something ancient and long buried.

He yearns to glimpse a legendary sunken city that will resurface only when the sea parts once more. While he waits, he engages with the locals, listening to their worries and their routines. He discovers a society of ordinary people, the innkeepers among them, who have surrendered much of their spirituality to entertainment—music, television, feasts, and dances that drown out deeper yearnings. The housewife of the inn becomes a sexual encounter for him, a momentary beacon of fleshly connection in a world that seems to have forgotten reverence.

Meanwhile, the degenerates cling to religion and a thread of spirituality that survives in their midst. One of them, the innkeepers’ maid, believes that the Visitor is a divine savior sent by God and begs him not to abandon his quest. At her invitation, the hero attends a nocturnal gathering of degenerates, a service in which the crowd pleads for a miraculous ascent from the desolate post-apocalyptic realm to heaven. This ritual experience stirs a deep, personal awakening in him, a spiritual epiphany that reframes his understanding of humanity.

As fear and awe ripple through the ordinary world, its people begin to fear him, suspecting that he might be a mutant hidden beneath a human form. The moment the sea finally parts, he ventures toward the sunken city, overwhelmed with emotion as he prays to God to atone for the sins of humanity. The finale shifts the dynamics: the housewife, who had once scorned religion and mutants, experiences a personal revelation under the Visitor’s influence, while the Visitor himself descends into a fevered religious frenzy, his voice reduced to cries and convulsions in a struggle to find and define divinity.