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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.
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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