Territory of Light
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
'Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality' Margaret Drabble
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 you have 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, 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.
'There is something deeply seductive about being drawn into the intimate thoughts of a woman who otherwise would tell them to no one. [ . . . ] This portrait of an imperfect mother who strives to provide a good life for her child feels painfully relevant.' Rowan Hisayo Buchanan
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A young woman confronts life as a single mother in this graceful, eye-opening novel from Tsushima (1937 2016), one of the most influential feminists in Japanese literature. An unnamed radio archivist rents a light-filled Tokyo apartment with her unnamed two-year-old daughter after separating from her husband, Fujino, a deadbeat film student. Over the course of a year, the mother readjusts her routines, tentatively attempts to kindle a romance with one of her husband's tutoring students, and, most challenging of all, transitions to single parenthood. She experiences nightmares about her daughter dying, then guilt that some part of her wishes it were so; she longs to have her "old life back," yet does everything she can to make her daughter feel "keenly alive." "Why were children the only ones who ever got to melt down?" she wonders. As the separation from her husband becomes a divorce, the mother begins to find her footing with the assistance of a friend who offers to babysit. But even once the mother has embarked on a spur-of-the-moment solo trip to the seaside, she can't forget her daughter and finds "the physical distance between us allowed me a pillowy kind of peace." Equal parts brutal and tender, Tsushima's portrait of the strains and joys of motherhood is captivating.
