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A Novel
by Yuko Tsushima
Book Reviewed by:From one of the most significant contemporary Japanese writers, a haunting, dazzling novel of loss and rebirth
I was puzzled by how I had changed. But I could no longer go back ...
It is spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light streaming through the windows, so bright she has to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness, becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become.
At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Yūko Tsushima’s Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire, and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time. It won the inaugural Noma Literary Prize.
THE WATER'S EDGE
During the night, there had been a sound of water on the other side of the wall. In my sleep I was looking out from the fourth-floor bedroom at nearby buildings bathed in rain, gleaming with neon and streetlamp colours. It was a light, tenuous sound. I couldn't say at what hour of the night it had started. It could well have been there when I went to bed; then again, it could have been an illusion as I was on the brink of waking.
In the morning, when I opened the windows wide, dazzling sunlight burst in, together with the thrum of traffic. The sky was pure blue. The streets were dry. Perfectly dry, even in the shade.
Happy to see another fine day, I set about waking my daughter without wondering where the night's rain could have got to, leaving not the slightest puddle. I had a feeling that it was still raining elsewhere, someplace like that spot I couldn't quite reach behind my back. It was a lingering sensation, close at hand, of water in the distance. I had almost ...
Territory of Light thoughtfully considers what it means to raise a child as a single mother with little support. The author's understated prose mitigates the unsettling events of the plot. Tsushima's language is unadorned, her sentences terse, her descriptions clear. Her neat style establishes a contemplative and subdued tone, in spite of the dysfunctional and sometimes sensational storyline...continued
Full Review
(623 words)
(Reviewed by Michael Kaler).
Born in 1947 in the Tokyo suburb of Mitaka, Yūko Tsushima was one of the most accomplished Japanese novelists of her generation at the time of her death from lung cancer in 2016. The author remains lesser known outside of Japan, but with the recent translations of Territory of Light and Of Dogs and Walls, there has been a small wave of critical and popular interest in her work in the English-speaking world.
Tsushima's work can be divided into two periods. Her earlier novels and stories experiment with the conventions of "I-fiction," a dominant narrative style of Japanese prose. The genre features a meditative first-person voice, a focus on intimate bonds between characters, and an interest in blurring the line between fact and ...
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