Woman Running in the Mountains
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Set in 1970s Japan, this tender and poetic novel about a young, single mother struggling to find her place in the world is an early triumph by a modern Japanese master.
Alone at dawn, in the heat of midsummer, a young woman named Takiko Odaka departs on foot for the hospital to give birth to a baby boy. Her pregnancy, the result of a brief affair with a married man, is a source of sorrow and shame to her abusive parents. For Takiko, however, it is a cause for reverie. Her baby, she imagines, will be hers and hers alone, a challenge that she also hopes will free her. Takiko’s first year as a mother is filled with the intense bodily pleasures and pains that come from caring for a newborn. At first she seeks refuge in the company of other women—in the hospital, in her son’s nursery—but as the baby grows, her life becomes less circumscribed as she explores Tokyo, then ventures beyond the city into the countryside, toward a mountain that captures her imagination and desire for a wilder freedom.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The quiet and elegant latest in English from Tsushima (Territory of Light), first published in Japan in 1980, is a moving portrait of a woman struggling to figure out who she is amid societal and familial expectations. Takiko, 21, is a single mother—her child the result of a one-night stand with a married coworker—who is physically abused by her father and constantly shamed by her mother. Many scenes are dedicated to simple moments, like Takiko admiring a view from a hospital window, yet underneath it all is the pulsing pressure of society's burdens on her to put her role as a mother first. Tsushima depicts in gentle, often beautiful prose the ways Takiko navigates the financial and physical difficulties of motherhood as a working woman. While the plot loses direction in the middle, save a few memorable scenes in which Takiko fights with her father or speaks with a friend, Tsushima's attention to detail and grace with language carry the story until the third act, where Takiko's internal struggles culminate in her self-realization. This sticks the landing as a passionate, urgent story about desire and self-identity.
