Sue Sumii (1902-97) is remembered for the multipart novel "The River with No Bridge" (1961-73), which sold more than 4 million copies and made its author famous all over Japan. It is a brave and passionate account of the lives of Japan's proscribed class, the burakumin. Their history is one of enduring the intolerance and bigotry of the citizenry at large -- a history that continues to this day.
Though the so-called Edict of Emancipation, which stipulated equal treatment for the burakumin, was promulgated in 1871, it has never been widely observed. Only several years ago, a number of major local companies were revealed as having subscribed to a directory that listed both the new and old names of "outcast" settlements. In this way the companies could avoid accidentally hiring burakumin descendants.
Indeed, as one of the characters in the novel says, upon remembering the days of the edict: "You needn't think you can start rejoicing yet: It won't make a scrap of difference for at least 100 years." And, it turns out, not even then -- not even now.
All of this prejudice is directed against a group that is in no way different from the majority except for the degree of bigotry it must endure. There are no historically valid reasons for the prejudice, but there may be some psychological causes -- such as the compulsion of the majority to discover a "pure," unique and homogeneous quality in itself, and a consequent need for some "other" against which to define itself.
The entire social system seems to have been designed to accommodate this purposely created class. The anthropologist Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney says that the group was degraded because of the uses to which a growing government could put it. That this was also the opinion of Sumii herself is revealed in this book-length series of interviews, conducted by her daughter, and originally published in 1995.
She several times points out that if there were no emperor there would be no burakumin -- that is, one needed the other to define itself. She does not mean Hirohito (though she is elsewhere highly critical of him), but the Imperial system itself.
In her novel the Emperor attends some military maneuvers, and later the excited village folk, rummaging about, discover his cigarette butts, each with its Imperial seal. Even more excitement is occasioned when one townsman discovers what he takes to be the Emperor's excrement.
"Funny what a different there is between people when we're all the same human beings," says one of the characters. "There they are, treating the Emperor's crap like a treasure, but in our case they think even the rice we grow is dirty and stinks." For the young hero of the book listening to this, the important fact is just this homely proof that the Emperor is not a god, that the Emperor is himself human.
It marks the beginning of a new awareness, and it also makes a splendid symbol -- a concrete embodiment of purity/pollution that displays (rather than merely recounts) one of the major concerns of this work. Such moments, however, rather rarely.
Often the most liberal sentiments are voiced through the most conservative of styles. Sumii's novel is realist, intensely discursive and naturalistically detailed. But it is also didactic, usually after the fact. We are shown the people's plight and its cause, and hence do not need the author's assurance that they "knew in their bones how much evil could come of a society that placed the authority of an emperor above all else."
But literary standards are of small importance here, because the message is the most important thing about the multipart novel, and it is one that can scarcely be stated strongly enough. In the interviews in "My Life," the same direct, sententious tone is maintained. The author is brave and fights the good fight -- her example has inspired many people.
This is not enough for some of her admirers, however. The author of the introduction to this edition complains that Sumii's novel has not won official recognition by the local literary establishment and academia at large. Blamed is the prejudice for "high-brow" fiction. Actually, it is maintained, the novel "must be ranked among the outstanding achievements of 20th-century Japanese literature."
Sumii herself would not agree. In fact, in the interviews she clearly states that she would never value such an evaluation, that literary prizes would mean nothing to her. And fittingly so. She is a journalistic reporter of great courage and probity who adapted naturalism to her own purposes. The important thing, she says, "is to say exactly what needs to be said, and leave behind your work as a proper record." This is just what she did, and we now have not only the novel but also this illuminating series of interviews, which show why and how she wrote it.
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