Malta Kano’s refusal to charge for her work

Malta Kano’s refusal to charge for her work distinguishes her consultations and research into water from a paid profession. She says the work is nonprofit and that she has other means of support; her sister’s recollection of Malta’s travels shows the principle in tension with the practical need to stay alive.

Work and Means of Support

Asked about her profession, Malta clarifies that she is a consultant who talks with people about the elements of the body and researches water believed to have beneficial effects on those elements. She does not take money for this work. Her lack of a listed address or telephone number on her card reflects her practice of making the calls herself, rather than advertising a conventional business.

Malta explains that fees are unnecessary for her because she has assets: her father, a doctor, placed stocks and real estate in a living trust for her and her younger sister, with an accountant managing them. The trust provides a decent annual income, supplemented by a little income from several books she has written. This financial arrangement allows her to describe her work as an entirely nonprofit activity, rather than a livelihood sustained by clients.

The Principle in the Context of Her Travels

The account of Malta’s earlier travels complicates, without contradicting, her no-fee practice. She left Japan after high school, lived for two years in a commune on Kauai, and continued traveling through Canada, the northern United States, and Europe in search of water she considered exceptional. When she ran out of money, she sometimes practiced fortune-telling, helping people locate missing belongings or persons in return for payment.

According to her sister, Malta would have preferred not to accept that money: she believed powers bestowed by heaven should not be exchanged for worldly goods. Yet on the road, divination was the only way she could keep herself alive. Her work attracted attention, and she found it easy to earn money; in England, she even helped police locate a missing child’s body and the murderer’s glove, after which the suspect was arrested and confessed. The episode makes the boundary clear: Malta’s refusal to charge is an expressed ideal governing her consulting and research, while her earlier payments arose under the material pressures of travel and survival.

Significance

Malta’s principle is sustained not by an absence of money but by a source of income separate from the work itself. Trust assets and book royalties make it possible for her to consult without treating the bodily and spiritual questions she discusses as services to be sold. Her sister’s account preserves the cost of that ideal in an earlier period: when Malta lacked independent support, she accepted rewards despite believing that her abilities should not be traded. The contrast defines her refusal as both a practical arrangement in the present and a conviction tested by necessity in the past.