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ilse's review against another edition
3.0
Mothering in Japan
Looking down at the stagnant green water, I could picture as in a dream or a film that spot as it had appeared back then, some fifteen years earlier: a spot clad in flowers and fruit trees, where the sunshine seemed to have congealed. It was bright and tranquil, disquietingly so. No one must ever know about this place that made me yearn to dissolve until I became a particle of light myself. The way that light cohered in one place was unearthly. I gazed at its stillness without once ever going through the gate.
By twelve short vignettes, Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima (1947-2016) conveys a year in the life of the nameless narrator, a young woman living in Tokyo after she has been abandoned by her husband and tries to build a new life with her daughter of three. The vista offered upon a life set mainly within the walls of the apartment the woman moves into after the break-up is unvarnished and ruthless – the sudden and unsolicited adjustment to single parenthood isn’t a bed of roses.
Tsushima poignantly depicts the teetering process of finding oneself again after the disruptiveness of a separation – lately I saw this process compared to a vanishing of the sunlight, and finding oneself overnight living in the dusk, no longer able to perceive oneself clearly. Vacillating between resentment for her spouse Fujino not taking his responsibilities as a father and her propensity to ban the half-hearty father from his daughter’s life, the young woman has to discover herself again and to find herself a new identity. Reviving her own voice and freedom while struggling to organise her new life, single motherhood consumes her. Evoking an emotional landscape of exhaustion, despair, anger and remorse, Tsushima paints how she tries and fails to cope with social isolation, loneliness and the incessant neediness of a young child – candidly showing the degeneration of the apartment, her drinking excessively, oversleeping for work, her neglecting and abusing the child.
However, the more of those gloomy, cramped apartments I looked at, the further the figure of my husband receded from sight, and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal’s eyes.
As the title clarifies, Tsushima plays with images and language evocating and symbolizing space, light and dark, weaving them ingenuously into the drifting moods of the protagonist. The woman’s life partially withdraws to the interior, an inwardness echoed by the many scenes of the novel set in the apartment. While the year starts off with the almost blinding light in which the apartment is flooded, apparently evocating a new hopeful as well as frightening start, this gradually dims over the year, when the woman sinks more and more into depression, is haunted by fear for falling apart and of the dark, by memories, erotic dreams and ghostly nightmares which like dreamscapes continue when she is awake. Luminosity however returns and the woman’s troublesome journey to autonomy and self-containment seems to bring about a fragile balance of lightness and darkness imbued with more tenderly playful and intimate moments and joys of motherhood.
Each vignette comes under a delicate poetic title which a few times starkly contrasts with the glum rawness of the slice of life depicted, almost like a poem in its own right (‘A dream of birds’, ‘The magic words’), just like the light that floods the apartment and pulses in various forms in the life of the characters emphasizes the darkness and gives it a silver lining.
Like the two short stories I have read by her ([b:Of Dogs and Walls|36436102|Of Dogs and Walls|Yūko Tsushima|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1517680170s/36436102.jpg|58136681]) just before reading Territory of Light, this novel draws on not even thinly veiled autobiographical elements; symbols and metaphors created out of natural elements (light, water), themes and motifs (abandonment, death, single motherhood), narrative components (memories, dreamscapes) seem recurrent components as well. Like in the story The Watery Realm water is an ominous, menacing and at the same time solacing element, reminiscing the death of Tsushima’s father, the writer Osamu Dazai, who drowned himself together with his lover when Yuko Tsushima was one year old – and she refers to him when she writes ’At the time, I had not yet taken in the reality of my father’s death, I understood that I would never see him again in this world, but because there was a room at home that was just as it had been when it was his. I had entered the world at more or less the same time as my father departed it’ .
Fathers - and maybe men in general – Tsushima seems to imply, are essentially characterized or defined by their absence and the void that they leave behind – and their untrustworthiness. Children, mothers, grandmothers live in an intimate, but fraught feminine world in which interpersonal warmth is mingled with cruelty, communication is almost impossible and autonomy perpetually threatened by the outside world and by family.
Tsushima’s prose is visually stunning, elegant, atmospheric, raw and subtle at once. Although a slender novel, it took me oddly long to read it. As a collection of fragmentary episodes (the twelve chapters were originally published in monthly instalments in a literary journal), the narrative lacked flow; there is some repetitiveness in the describing of the banalities of everyday domestic life. A peculiar cruelty in the mother’s treatment of her toddler alienated and disconcerted me in a way which reminded me of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring – also the straightforward description of self-destructive or immature conduct one takes heed to avoid as a single mother (like the reversal of roles in which the toddler takes care of the mother during sickness) was painful to read.
Motherhood might be transformative, it doesn’t turn women into saints – we remain all the same flawed and fallible human beings.
(Photographs by Issei Suda)
My thanks go to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy.
Looking down at the stagnant green water, I could picture as in a dream or a film that spot as it had appeared back then, some fifteen years earlier: a spot clad in flowers and fruit trees, where the sunshine seemed to have congealed. It was bright and tranquil, disquietingly so. No one must ever know about this place that made me yearn to dissolve until I became a particle of light myself. The way that light cohered in one place was unearthly. I gazed at its stillness without once ever going through the gate.
By twelve short vignettes, Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima (1947-2016) conveys a year in the life of the nameless narrator, a young woman living in Tokyo after she has been abandoned by her husband and tries to build a new life with her daughter of three. The vista offered upon a life set mainly within the walls of the apartment the woman moves into after the break-up is unvarnished and ruthless – the sudden and unsolicited adjustment to single parenthood isn’t a bed of roses.
Tsushima poignantly depicts the teetering process of finding oneself again after the disruptiveness of a separation – lately I saw this process compared to a vanishing of the sunlight, and finding oneself overnight living in the dusk, no longer able to perceive oneself clearly. Vacillating between resentment for her spouse Fujino not taking his responsibilities as a father and her propensity to ban the half-hearty father from his daughter’s life, the young woman has to discover herself again and to find herself a new identity. Reviving her own voice and freedom while struggling to organise her new life, single motherhood consumes her. Evoking an emotional landscape of exhaustion, despair, anger and remorse, Tsushima paints how she tries and fails to cope with social isolation, loneliness and the incessant neediness of a young child – candidly showing the degeneration of the apartment, her drinking excessively, oversleeping for work, her neglecting and abusing the child.
However, the more of those gloomy, cramped apartments I looked at, the further the figure of my husband receded from sight, and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal’s eyes.
As the title clarifies, Tsushima plays with images and language evocating and symbolizing space, light and dark, weaving them ingenuously into the drifting moods of the protagonist. The woman’s life partially withdraws to the interior, an inwardness echoed by the many scenes of the novel set in the apartment. While the year starts off with the almost blinding light in which the apartment is flooded, apparently evocating a new hopeful as well as frightening start, this gradually dims over the year, when the woman sinks more and more into depression, is haunted by fear for falling apart and of the dark, by memories, erotic dreams and ghostly nightmares which like dreamscapes continue when she is awake. Luminosity however returns and the woman’s troublesome journey to autonomy and self-containment seems to bring about a fragile balance of lightness and darkness imbued with more tenderly playful and intimate moments and joys of motherhood.
Each vignette comes under a delicate poetic title which a few times starkly contrasts with the glum rawness of the slice of life depicted, almost like a poem in its own right (‘A dream of birds’, ‘The magic words’), just like the light that floods the apartment and pulses in various forms in the life of the characters emphasizes the darkness and gives it a silver lining.
Like the two short stories I have read by her ([b:Of Dogs and Walls|36436102|Of Dogs and Walls|Yūko Tsushima|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1517680170s/36436102.jpg|58136681]) just before reading Territory of Light, this novel draws on not even thinly veiled autobiographical elements; symbols and metaphors created out of natural elements (light, water), themes and motifs (abandonment, death, single motherhood), narrative components (memories, dreamscapes) seem recurrent components as well. Like in the story The Watery Realm water is an ominous, menacing and at the same time solacing element, reminiscing the death of Tsushima’s father, the writer Osamu Dazai, who drowned himself together with his lover when Yuko Tsushima was one year old – and she refers to him when she writes ’At the time, I had not yet taken in the reality of my father’s death, I understood that I would never see him again in this world, but because there was a room at home that was just as it had been when it was his. I had entered the world at more or less the same time as my father departed it’ .
Fathers - and maybe men in general – Tsushima seems to imply, are essentially characterized or defined by their absence and the void that they leave behind – and their untrustworthiness. Children, mothers, grandmothers live in an intimate, but fraught feminine world in which interpersonal warmth is mingled with cruelty, communication is almost impossible and autonomy perpetually threatened by the outside world and by family.
Tsushima’s prose is visually stunning, elegant, atmospheric, raw and subtle at once. Although a slender novel, it took me oddly long to read it. As a collection of fragmentary episodes (the twelve chapters were originally published in monthly instalments in a literary journal), the narrative lacked flow; there is some repetitiveness in the describing of the banalities of everyday domestic life. A peculiar cruelty in the mother’s treatment of her toddler alienated and disconcerted me in a way which reminded me of Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring – also the straightforward description of self-destructive or immature conduct one takes heed to avoid as a single mother (like the reversal of roles in which the toddler takes care of the mother during sickness) was painful to read.
Motherhood might be transformative, it doesn’t turn women into saints – we remain all the same flawed and fallible human beings.
(Photographs by Issei Suda)
My thanks go to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a review copy.
naello6's review against another edition
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
_blix_'s review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
sad
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
goodcleanbowling's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
relaxing
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
4.5
daniealexa_c_s's review against another edition
5.0
Estamos en una historia donde vemos por un año la vida de una mujer recientemente divorciada, con su pequeña, enfrentándose a la injusticia de su sociedad, de sus amigos y familiares, e incluso de su propio (ex)marido. Habla de la maternidad y lo estresante que puede llegar a ser y... me quedo sin palabras para describir lo asfixiada que me hizo sentir
bosshog's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
4.0
accorintijeanette's review against another edition
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.25
asagaria's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
inspiring
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.5
yeehaw_agenda's review against another edition
4.0
Tsushima did an incredible job putting me in the head of a mother who is doting but selfish, grounded but untethered. She was allowed to be complicated and have moments where I was repulsed by her and moments I adored her. One of the best character pieces I have read in a while, and one of the few that allows the character to experience the full range of human emotions without judgment.