MASUDA: You began writing The River with No Bridge after Father passed away [1953].

SUMII: Yes. I couldn't have written it while he was living. I'd done some preparation, but to write it I had to be ready to travel all around Japan. I didn't have the freedom to do that while taking care of him during his illness, so I hadn't begun. At this point, if there's anything I want to investigate, I can go anywhere.

MASUDA: You began writing when you were around fifty-five years old. In some sense, that was exactly the right period in your life for traveling around.

SUMII: That's right.

MASUDA: You were still young, the transportation network was being laid down, and before long, the bullet train was completed.

SUMII: It was a theme I'd been thinking about for many years. Someone who hadn't actually had contact with the burakumin of Yamato would have been completely unable to write about them. On the other hand, someone who'd been born into the middle of that life would also have been quite unable to write about it. I think that the distance from which I saw it was just right. Come to think of it, if I had been born among the burakumin, I may well have lived only until the age of fifteen in the first place.

MASUDA: Yes, like the young character who dies in The River with No Bridge.

SUMII: That's right. Killed by poverty or suicide by the age of fifteen. If I had been born a burakumin, I may or may not have been able to survive.

MASUDA: The first volume was published in September of 1961, and it be-came a long-selling series, with the seventh volume published in September of 1992. It also came out in paperback.

SUMII: Five million copies altogether, they say. An English journalist came to gather material about it, and he said that if you sell five million copies, you'll be able to say what you want to say. You can say all you want when your book is a bestseller. Now it's being translated into Italian.

MASUDA: It's already been translated and published in Chinese, English, and Tagalog.

SUMII: We encountered the most indifference in Japan! (laughing) MASUDA: It would be interesting to know where the title The River with No Bridge came from, and how you decided to use it. Did you suddenly think of it one morning, or did it just drop off the tip of your pen?

SUMII: No. If I were to express in words our relationship to the people of the buraku, it would be "river with no bridge." Though we may want to go to them, there's a river between us that neither of us can cross. There is no bridge: they cannot come here and we cannot go there. That's the picture I visualize. It's not something I arrived at by verbal reasoning.

MASUDA: You've had this picture inside your head ever since you were a child.

SUMII: The Katsuragi River and the Soga River were there. Their flow bisected the space between us.

MASUDA: You were separated by the rivers that actually flow through the Yamato basin, with the burakumin on the other side of the rivers.

SUMII: Right. The course of the rivers established our mutual positions. So the title The River with No Bridge came automatically.

MASUDA: The story starts with a description of a dream about a bridge. In the dream, Fude is running along the bank, unable to cross the river." It's a good title. Did you have the feeling that once you had the title, you had the story?

SUMII: Yes, I did think that once I had the title, I had the book.

MASUDA: That's how it is. When you've got a good title, you get the feeling that you've done it! Something that goes straight to a person's ear, eye, and mind is good. For example, Hakai (The Broken Commandment). If you pronounce the word "hakai," it also means "destroy," though you don't immediately think of a broken commandment. The "river with no bridge" is ...

SUMII: Part of life.

MASUDA: I see. Everyone's familiar with bridges and rivers, so it's very easy to form an image in the mind from that title. Also, it conveys the right feeling. If it were "Uncrossable Sea," it would be too self-evident. There are people who have swum across the Straits of Dover, but only one out of several million can do it. A river is something that you would expect to be able to cross, but there was one that you couldn't cross. The lack of a bridge was really poignant.

SUMII: I went to a meeting of the Buraku Liberation League, and when I returned, I began writing. So I started in 1958, in the fall of the thirty-third year of Sh?wa.

MASUDA: That spring, you had placed Papa's ashes in a tomb for unknown soldiers at Aoyama Cemetery in Tokyo. Then you turned around and went straight to the Tokyo office of the Buraku Liberation League. You requested that they allow you to participate in their movement, starting that very day.

SUMII: That's right, that's how I started. I had no personal experience of the suffering caused by discrimination against the burakumin, so even though I wanted to write about it, I would not have been capable of doing so. What I had noticed was that I didn't understand what it was to be discriminated against—that was all.

MASUDA: So you actually went to a burakumin village. The people at the Institute for Research on the Buraku Problem in Kyoto helped you.

SUMII: At that time, the struggle against "employment evaluation" was beginning everywhere." Teachers and parents were fighting the national rules that would discriminate among teachers. The conflict was most intense and fervent in the districts where the Buraku Liberation League was most active, probably because those were the areas where people were the most sensitive to discrimination and aware of how bad it was. In Asso district in Wakayama Prefecture, elementary and middle school students formed an alliance and stayed out of school to express their opposition to the rules. Around a hundred children gathered in a temple, where they studied during the day and held meetings at night. They allowed me to join them inside the temple.

MASUDA: That was really a revelation for you.

SUMII: Really. The children were very perceptive, and they could tell that if the employment evaluation rules were adopted by the school, that would be the end of democratic education. Living with discrimination, as they did, they knew in their guts that this was something that would make it worse.

MASUDA: So first you got to know the children.

SUMII: They were showing the movie My Brother's Essay (Tsuzurikata ky?mei) in a nearby town, and the children of the alliance who were staying out of school went to see it. I went with them.

MASUDA: I remember that movie, too. It was about a family that had been evacuated, and the younger brother, who was working as a newsboy, got pneu-monia and died. After he died, it turned out that he'd won first prize in an international essay contest. All you could do was cry and cry, watching that movie.

SUMII: But what I happened to notice was that the children of the buraku and the children of the other village cried at different scenes in the movie. The buraku children were all sitting on my left, and the others were on my right. The children on my left started sobbing when Fusao, the younger brother, was suffering from pneumonia. At that point, the children on my right made fun of them, laughing and saying, "Those guys are crying!" Then Fusao took his last breath and died. All at once, the children on the right began sobbing. The children on the left wiped their tears, and concentrated intently on the last scene.

MASUDA: They cried at different scenes, for different reasons.

SUMII: Yes, they were different. But I couldn't understand why they were different, so I asked the children when we had a discussion meeting that night.

MASUDA: What did the children say?

SUMII: I was surprised when they suddenly responded, "Teacher, all human beings will die at some time." That was it. All human beings die. That's natural. Hadn't I just been taught that the previous year when your father died? "So death is not frightening and not sad. What was sad was that a boy like Fusao wouldn't be able to see a doctor because he was poor, so he would wind up dying from neglect. Poverty and discrimination killed Fusao. After he died, wasn't it too late to cry?" The children's voices reverberated in my mind. That night I didn't sleep a wink, and I was still awake at daybreak. For the first time I was able to under-stand perhaps one ten-thousandth of the pain of being discriminated against, thanks to the children. When I was riding home on the T?kaid? line, tears came to my eyes again and again as I thought of how conceited I had been to think of writing a novel without understanding that real pain.

MASUDA: That experience opened up the path ahead of you.

SUMII: It opened my eyes. After that, I went out to visit the burakumin in various places to be taught by them as I wrote. So I think there is no need for the name Sumii Sue to be on this novel.

MASUDA: In general, the women who appear in the book are all very energetic.

SUMII: The first time I went to a meeting of the women's section of the Buraku Liberation League in Wakayama, I was surprised by their energy. Usually, when the formalities of most other women's meetings were over, there would be an opportunity for each person to make her own statement of principles, but hardly anybody would come to the microphone to speak. But at these meetings, they would scramble over the microphone, waiting for someone to hand it to them. There was always someone else in line. Everyone had some-thing she wanted to say, and everyone spoke eloquently.

MASUDA: What sort of thing did they say?

SUMII: They would make statements of principle. They would assert that human beings should be equal, and they would talk about how wrong the imperial system was. An eighty-year-old woman said that if there were no longer an emperor, the next day there would be no burakumin. As for their personal stories, some people talked about the kind of poverty they endured, but there were all kinds of stories, and everyone wanted to tell them. It was the first time I'd seen women scrambling over a microphone. The fact that they wanted to speak so badly tells you something about the kind of life they were living.

MASUDA: The burakumin women were learning to read and write in literacy classes.

SUMII: Yes. At night, everyone took literacy classes. They'd been robbed even of the opportunity to learn to read, so literacy classes were formed in Osaka and Kyoto. The women were holding pencils and notebooks in their hands for the first time in their lives. They carried those pencils and notebooks joyfully to class when evening came, delighted to have their own supplies. At the beginning of the literacy course, they learned the biragana [phonetic symbols] for "ah, ee, u, eh, o," starting with "ah." When the teacher wrote "ah" on the black-board, the students would be unable to draw a straight horizontal line, be cause they'd tense up and push too hard. Then when they were told to make a small vertical line which must curve a little bit to the left as it goes down, they'd complain that they couldn't make it curve! They'd look at whoever was sitting next to them and say, "Oh, so that's how you do it!" Then they'd try again to make it go down from the right and curve to the left, but it was difficult. The teacher would show them how to make the curve, but they couldn't do it. The line would go off on its own. When everyone had finished writing the kana for "ah," they'd look at each other's work, and the kana all looked like crabs walking sideways! (laughing) Their speaking, on the other hand, was excellent, and full of humor. The stories of their tribulations were so moving that we would listen in tears, laughing and crying at the same time. They were both painful and funny.

Even though it was so difficult for them, the women were really happy when the teacher announced that they could move on to learning the next kana. When they'd finished all fifty hiragana, it was time to begin learning the kanji [characters]. But how could they do it? Even if they wrote furigana [small running script in kana to indicate pronunciation] beside them forever, they couldn't begin to make any progress."' So they agreed that they would memorize characters such as sakura (cherry blossom) and ume (plum) without furigana.

One woman woke up in the middle of the night and tried to remember what the characters were, but she couldn't. They had promised each other that they would learn them in one night, but it was no good-she still couldn't remember them. So she put on her kimono and went to knock on her neighbor's door, waking her up to ask, "How do you read that word?" The answer was, "I forgot!" (laughing)

MASUDA: The neighbor forgot, too.

SUMII: She said that even though she asked several people, they'd all forgot-ten, and meanwhile, dawn was breaking. How hard those women worked to learn a single kanji! Even simple kanji like "plum" or "cherry blossom" are very difficult for adults to learn.

MASUDA: That's true. Once you're an adult, trying to memorize them is just like learning a foreign language.

SUMII: She went from one friend to another, knocking on the door and waking them up, but everyone said they'd forgotten! (laughing) They went to so much trouble. To think that people who had to do that in order to learn to read would be reading The River with No Bridge brought tears to my eyes as I wrote. When I went to see them, they received me happily, and even though I thought that I would only stay until midnight, by the time I noticed how late it was, it would already be three in the morning. When they got together, they always stayed until daybreak.

MASUDA: They must all have been good speakers.

SUMII: Eloquent. They weren't deferring to men, and they were overflowing with fighting spirit. They were so full of energy that they didn't know the meaning of fatigue or depression. Getting together and talking all night until dawn was the easiest work of all.

MASUDA: It must be, when you're employed in a glue factory.

SUMII: That's right, they were doing manual labor, or carrying their children on their backs while they worked as peddlers.

MASUDA: Then after the war, even when the agricultural land was redistributed, I suppose that the burakumin didn't receive any farming land.

SUMII: Only people who already had seven-tenths of an acre that they were actually cultivating were allocated farmland.

MASUDA: What? That was stipulated at the time?

SUMII: Yes.

MASUDA: So people who had less than that, or nothing, didn't get anything? Even if they wanted to be farmers?

SUMII: Right. People who had absolutely no land at all didn't get any farming land, and neither did people who had more than the basic seven-tenths of an acre but were not cultivating it. So in many cases the land redistribution was not applicable to the burakumin. It was not a true, hundred percent land reform.

MASUDA: But if it's called land reform, then the land is supposed to be di-vided equally among the people who need it!

SUMII: It's wrong not to give it to the people who really don't have any. Re-form in general, and also reform in Japan, has always been self-interest in disguise, the government trying to make itself look good.

MASUDA: Yes, and then the people who were left behind wind up being even more left behind. Discrimination is preserved, and the people at the bottom of the social scale are kept there.

SUMII: Those at the bottom stay there.

MASUDA: Furthermore, if you're looking at who is at the bottom among the burakumin, it's the women, not the men. Come to think of it, it was because you were a woman that you were able to write about this subject so well. If you divide men and women, it's the women, after all, who get stuck at the bottom.

SUMII: There would be a major inconsistency in a man writing about human equality.

MASUDA: It would be contradictory for a man. If you weren't a woman, you couldn't have written this.

SUMII: I couldn't have written it.

MASUDA: Of course there're also classes among women. There's a huge gap in subsistence and consciousness between women of the affluent class and women of the burakumin. But no matter how high their social class, women are subject to a great deal of male violence, male rule, or male pressure at home. When they go out, they may be shoved aside on the train because they're female. I think that when you look at it, the reality is that, no matter what kind of position they might be born into, women are discriminated against in this world.

SUMII: They're the weak ones.

MASUDA: They're kept in a position of weakness. That's why The River with No Bridge couldn't have been written by a man.

SUMII: I think you're right about that.

MASUDA: After the war, the freedoms of speech, expression, and publishing were guaranteed under the constitution, and the burakumin emancipation movement was strengthened. Also, the shinkansen [rapid transit train between Tokyo and Osaka] was gradually completed, enabling you to get where you wanted to go.

SUMII: I was blessed by good circumstances.

Sumii, Sue. My Life: Living, Loving, and Fighting. An Arbor, MI: The Center for Japanese Studies, University Michigan, 2001; pp. 73-77, 83-86.