Collect The River With No Bridge Developed By Sue Sumii In PDF

bit heavy on emphasizing the mistreatment of the eta it read a bit like a moral lesson, but still very compelling, I loved Seitaro and Koji, and their grandmother! I never would have known about River were it not for my Goodreads friend DJ who read it recently, I decided to read it because he gave it astar rating, it is readily available via the Internet Archive, and I have a burgeoning interest in the Eta community of Japan.


Written in a spare but at times still evocative prose, Sumii merits praise on at least three counts, First, she developed a thorough and nuanced depiction of this rural community in the earlyth century, Although the government declared their equality in, the reality of their lives is much different than that, Over the course of the novel one can learn much about the prejudice, if not at times open scorn and hatred, they had to cope with, The children are treated badly by many of their peers as well as most of their teachers in school, The adults are only allowed to work in certain kinds of employment,

Second, the author provided a great deal of social commentary about life in Japan at that time, Institutional social and economic inequality, arbitrary government policies, the demands for complete loyalty and obedience to the Emperor along with other aspects of Japanese society of that era are all critiqued in the context of actual historical events.


Finally, the portrayal of the lives of one family is wonderfully well done,   As the novel progresses the main character an elementary school aged boy named Koji and his older brother Seitaro along with their Mother and Grandmother are depicted with great insight and, at times, poignancy.
 Friends of the boys, their teachers, and a few extended family members  are also nicely developed,  

In providing a smattering of Japanese language vocabulary throughout the novel the translator heightened the sense of authenticity for the reader, Each of these were demarcated with an asterisk and then explained in pages of notes at the end of the book,   In this way, the reader is afforded an opportunity to learn about Japanese customs, food, etc,  

I have two modest critiques of River,   First, those readers who are not familiar with the countrys history may find some of the references hard to follow,   Second, some of the social commentary gets to be a bit redundant, if not heavy handed, on occasion,  

Overall, however, it was an informative and engaging read,  Per the translator's introduction this is the first ofvolumes which Sumii published about this family and their community, I hope another volume or two will be translated,  

Addendum: Tuttle publishing informed me that it has no intention to publish another English language translation of these novels,

How unfortunate! The story in this book was very engaging and left me wishing I could read the original in its original language, So much is lost in translation, and if the translation left me wondering every time I read it, I wonder what the original would have invoked, I was saddened to learn that out of the seven volumes that Sue Sumii wrote, only this first volume has been translated into English, The characters, especially Koji, were easy to identify with and wellrounded, The issues of discrimination posed by the book, which took place at the beginning of theth century, are issues still felt today, It has been a while since I have read something so compelling that I couldn't wait to be able to read more, I understand how some readers might find this novel heavyhanded in places, but I think it's almost inevitable given the subject matter and themes, I found the story of the eta community in earlythcentury Japan riveting, and the portrayals of the children, especially but not limited to Seitaro and Koji, as authentic as portrayals of children in literature anywhere.
I loved this book and hope to read Sumii's subsequent five volumes one day, Read this in Japanese. It is only the first of seven in the story, My friend, young Glaswegian in rural Japan, was teaching English as a foreign language every Tuesday evening to a small group of adults, Scrabbling around for a topic to discuss in English, he settled on the experience of burakumin, At the start of the class, he wrote the word across the blackboard and, . . there was shock, there was horror, there was one old woman getting up to erase it, All of the students refused to discuss burakumin,

When he told the story to the other foreigners, we all rolled our eyes at another example of Japanese people finding an issue to avoid being frank about.
But then a chap from Florida piped up "But if it was the South of the States, and a naive young Japanese guy opened his adult education class by writing the N word across the blackboard.
. . " Well, he had a point,

Back to "The River with No Bridge", . . I thought it was going to be Japan's sitelinkTo Kill a Mockingbird but it's a bit too plodding and unlovely, really,

.Un affresco interessante della realtà degli "eta", gli intoccabili del Giappone, all'inizio del 'visto attraverso gli occhi di un bambino, Non ci vengono risparmiati momenti tragici e alcuni passaggi hanno una grandissima forza, Peccato per la lentezza della narrazione, che rende la lettura un po' difficile, Written during thes, this courageous work explores the intolerance and bigotry faced daily by Japan's largest minority group, the Burakumin, .