River with No Bridge
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
The River With No Bridge (Hashi no nai kawa) explores with outspoken frankness a subject still taboo in Japan: the intolerance and bigotry faced daily by Japan’s largest minority group, the burakumin.
Racially no different from other Japanese, over the centuries burakumin have been cruelly ostracized for their association with occupations considered defiling. Spanning the years 1908 to 1924, the original six volumes of this novel trace the developing awareness of burakumin of their rights and dignity as human beings. Volume 1, translated into English for the first time in 1990, is a story about childhood in a burakumin village. It tells of young Koji Hatana’s questioning of the rigid social order and his growing sense of injustice as he meets prejudice from other children at school and from his teachers who try to instill in him their belief that since he was born defiled he should resign himself to his fate.
Told against the backdrop of Japan’s struggle to shed its feudalistic past and enter the modern age, the novel is a courageous work and a compelling read.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Japan's three million burakumin outcasts (``new commoners''), are racially no different from other Japanese, yet their traditional identification with ``unclean'' occupations--midwifery, tanning, butchering, etc.--has served as a pretext for continued discrimination against them. Their plight is dramatized in this very leisurely novel, set around 1908-13, the first part of a six-volume epic which Sumii completed in 1973, and of which this is the first English translation. Koji, an eta and a prize pupil, endures schoolmates' biased taunts; his teacher calls him a poisonous snake. His older brother, outspoken Seitaro, leaves school and becomes a rice dealer's apprentice. When a burakumin village burns down, playmates jeer that the fire stank because eta burned in it. Translated with a light touch, Sumii's delicate narrative draws back a curtain to reveal Japan's ugly secret and to show the insidious effects of prejudice. It also throws a sharp light on Japan's rigid school system.
