Excerpt from Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

When I replaced the receiver, however, he had looked up and said, 'I hope everything works out for you soon.'
I blushed, startled: I had thought of him as an old man too absorbed in his archives and his books to have any interest in his assistant's private life. Had he been listening to all our phone calls, then? I hadn't told him that I had started living with Fujino, but he must have been taking it all in. In fact, why wouldn't he, when I came to think about it, but my boss's tactfulness had escaped my attention till then.

'It gets tiring when you take forever to settle down, especially for the woman ... Take good care of yourself.' I nodded, disconcerted.

Kobayashi had been a radio presenter. An unlikely one, I thought, with his hoarse voice, but in any event, nearly twenty years into his career, there'd apparently been some personal trouble that led to his being transferred from one section to another until he ended up in charge of the library that was being set up in an annex. He was a gruff man in his sixties who always looked unwell, but his young colleagues had given him quite an affectionate nickname, 'Chairman of the Board.' A good many of them would stop by to pass the time. They seemed to say things expressly to provoke him, as if it amused them to watch the changes in his dour expression. I gathered also, from these exchanges, that he lived as a bachelor.

After Kobayashi spoke up, I'd felt both oddly touched by his concern and damned if I was going to let him feel sorry for me, which, together, made me smile more often in his direction. Kobayashi, for his part, took to inviting me out for a coffee during office hours, or for a drink after work in a bar where he was a regular with his name on a bottle of whisky. 'Help yourself anytime,' he urged me. 'A woman's entitled to have a drink when she feels like it too.' But I could hardly drink his whisky with Fujino, and I never called in at the bar unless I was in Kobayashi's company. As there wasn't really anything for the two of us to have deep discussions about, I found his kindness a little burdensome. Kobayashi remained dour wherever he was and however much he drank; he talked about work and books, and never referred to my private life again. After walking me to the station, it seemed he would head for another bar in a different area. His fondness for alcohol was known to everyone at work.

All the same, though he refrained from giving me advice, I had perhaps sensed from this new sociability of his that he was a little worried about me, and when Fujino and I got formally married, the first person I wanted to announce it to was not my mother but Kobayashi. While it was true that I sometimes resented Kobayashi and even wondered what he was playing at when, as always, I was called to account by Fujino on getting home late after these evenings – 'You just don't care that you live with me, do you?' he'd say, among other accusations – at the same time, I felt sure that Kobayashi would be more pleased than anyone to hear the news of our marriage.

When I made the announcement, adding apologetically that I knew I'd caused him to worry, Kobayashi gave a wry smile and muttered, 'It's nothing to do with me.' That was his only comment. But I felt as though I had received his good wishes, and dipped my head again, smiling.

I no longer went to the bar with Kobayashi after that – for one thing, I was soon pregnant. Instead, as it happened, we got into the habit of spending a leisurely lunchtime together at our facing desks, after I'd gone out for sandwiches, buying his along with my own. We often listened to music on a little radio I'd brought, or sampled Kobayashi's favourites among the archived programmes, and sometimes a visitor would join us, lunchbox in hand; once the baby arrived, I would often hold forth all lunch hour, explaining to Kobayashi how cute and funny she was, even showing him photos. I also regaled him with a lecture on the 'new cinema,' which Fujino had stayed on at university to study and to which he wanted to dedicate his life. On that occasion too, after hearing me out he'd had just one thing to say: 'Kids grow up so fast – think of all the home movies he could be making.'

Copyright © 1979, 1993 by Yūko Tsushima
English translation copyright © 2018 by Geraldine Harcourt