The ‘Untouchables’ of Japan : THE RIVER WITH NO BRIDGE<i> by Sue Sumii; translated by Susan Wilkinson (Charles E. Tuttle:$19.95; 359 pp.) </i>

Despite the seamless image they often present to others, the Japanese are not without their faults. Like everyone else, they can be vain and grasping, and, depending on which cultural sinkhole they’ve fallen into at the time, quite cruel.

Sue Sumii’s novel, of which this is the first of six volumes, describes a particularly ugly and unsettling aspect of Japanese life--their propensity to discriminate against their own kind.

The origins of the eta , the Japanese untouchables (nowadays usually called burakumin , meaning “hamlet people”) is shrouded in history. Some of the eta are perhaps descended from vanquished tribes. There also can be no doubt that organized religion (Shintoism, with its obsessive devotion to cleanliness and purity, and later, Buddhism, with its strictures against the slaughter and cleaning of animals) played a major role in lowering their station.

The eta (the word translates to “much filth”) were most certainly victims of primitive fears and superstitions. Death, injury, disease--subjects of defilement not easily explained away by pre-scientific man--came to be associated with the eta .

Although they spoke the same language and were no different religiously or genetically from their neighbors, a peculiar form of bigotry evolved. Labels were invented and applied to them--the eta were thought to stink, they were habitual troublemakers, incendiaries, liars, thieves. Children learned from their parents to shun them, behavior that soon became an irrefutable fact of life.

As a small minority in an unstable world, the eta ‘s only protection lay in the indispensability of their jobs. Much like the Jews of medieval Europe, they performed many necessary if inglorious tasks. The eta were midwives, undertakers, butchers, tanners, sandal makers. They produced fine leather saddles and bowstrings, invaluable during wartime. Despite their talents, they were despised by the masses.

Under the Tokugawa Shogunate, Japan was unified and peace broke out. Many eta skills, then, became less essential. Discrimination against them rose proportionately, reachingunprecedented heights. The Tokugawas saw in the eta a convenient scapegoat.

By law they segregated them from the rest of the community and forced them to live in their own villages. Dress codes were imposed so the eta could be more easily identified. They were forbidden to smoke, to sit or to eat with “commoners” (as the rest of the Japanese were called), and intermarriage, of course, was unthinkable. In one celebrated case in 1859, a judge even declared that a commoner who had killed an eta could not rightfully be subject to the death penalty, since an eta’s life was only equal to one-seventh of a commoner’s.

These legal nightmares came to an end with the Meiji Restoration in 1869. As part of the new government’s effort to modernize, discrimination was formally abolished. Social stigma lingered, however, and in many respects the eta ‘s position worsened. Whereas before they were shunned by society, now they were included with a vengeance, which meant that for the first time they had to pay taxes and serve in the army. And as Japan motored full throttle into the 20th Century, many people who fell by the wayside often took out their hostility and frustration on the hapless eta .

“The River With No Bridge” begins in 1908, shortly after the Russo-Japanese War, and culminates with the Tokyo Earthquake of 1923. This period saw the first seeds of political awareness among the eta , and their own special revolutionary credo, a kind of Oriental blend of Christianity and Marxism.

This first novel, sometimes reading like thinly disguised populist agit-prop, tracks the questioning of the system by one eta child, Koji Hatanaka. Koji’ s father has been killed in the Russo-Japanese war. His mother and grandmother barely scrape by, making sandals in the eta village of Komori. Koji and his older brother Seitaro go to the local grammar school, which serves several neighboring villages. There they encounter the bigotry of the wider world.

From the beginning, there is much heated discussion about the value of education. Is it truly the golden path to opportunity, as the government would like everyone to believe, or is progress a sham? Nui, the grandmother, who grew up during the worst of the Tokugawa abuses, is optimistic. For Fude, her daughter, bereft of her husband in a senseless war and struggling to raise two children, faith is difficult to come by. “If you ask me,” she says, “I don’t think it’ll make a scrap of difference whether the children have a good education or not. We’re eta , aren’t we? Though when it comes to war, we end up the wives and mothers of dead soldiers like everybody else.”

Seitaro expresses interest in ther military, in part to follow in his father’s footsteps, but also because it seems like a quick means of empowerment and a way out of the eta stigmatization. Long before the novel ends, however, he has left school and apprenticed himself to a rice merchant in Osaka. We hear from him infrequently, but each time we do it seems that he has grown stronger.

Koji is more scholarly than his brother; even at a young age he has embarked on a kind of internal immigration. Koji’s world often seems a melange of dreams and fairy tales, but out of his dreams he draws wisdom, and it is Koji who asks the poignant questions:

“Koji could not understand this at all. He had sensed that a famine was something dreadful, connected with death, and yet here they all were talking about people selling rice during it and making money. If that was so, how could it be a famine? Weren’t people meant to be helpless at such a time? Yet it seemed that the rich still had money and rice when ordinary people no longer had either. But why were some people rich and others so poor in the first place? Who had started dividing them up like that?”

“The River With No Bridge” inhabits pretty much the same moral world as Pearl Buck’s “The Good Earth” and Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.” It is filled with poor peasant folk, mainly tenant farmers, who are afflicted by all manner of natural disaster: fire, drought and famine as well as a collapsing tunnel and numerous humiliations at school.

Beneath these events, there is also a quiet but deep-seated conviction that the eta are not merely the salt of the earth; they also are the only ones who can bear witness to the ruthless hypocrisy of modern Japan, since they are the only ones not allowed to participate in its prosperous society.