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A review by daphnesayshi
Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima
4.0
I was originally really annoyed by the narrator's voice and the glacial pace with which everything was moving at, but as the book meandered along, the quintessentially Japanese-ness of the book struck me. Here is a woman much like many in Japan, passive and obliging but not necessarily a pushover. Here is an old lady who's desperate for company, and seeks it in the regular schedules of passersby. Here are two colleagues who know very little about each other, but it's okay, even perhaps preferred. And here is the middle aged stripper who regrets divorcimg her husband 15 years ago, and along with it a certain sense of security – likely primarily financial.
The culturally rigid structures of japanese society are captured well: there is a social fixation on being married even as less Japanese are doing so these days; social attitudes towards people who are divorced, or rather women who are divorced are also explored.
But i think most resonating for me is the reflection that we are nowhere near perfect beings. We try our best, we try to make things work, we persist and we trudge on even when we don't feel like. A wife can grow to stop loving her husband. A mother may not like her kid very much - at least not all the time. A woman may not necessarily need a man, or need to take care of one.
I think the book is a book of its time and space, and primarily reflects the fear and insecurity that this one japanese woman (and many others like her) have about a great number of things, but mostly of her womanhood, especially as is prescribed by a patriarchal and traditional society. The narrator is stripped from all of that – divorced from her unreasonable husband, struggling to care for her problematic child, and without a home to keep in order, she seems lost. What is she if not what she knows?
I think the distanced, impersonal tone of voice and seemingly banal smattering of life observations not only reminds me of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway but also lends to the growing sense of claustrophobia...of a certain panic that comes from wondering what's next (or if even there is anything that comes next that is less mind numbing than the ones before).
But ultimately, by the book's end, i get a sense of pensive optimism, that things will be alright even as they remain imperfect.
this book is also pretty special in that it was translated by the aunt of a friend.
The culturally rigid structures of japanese society are captured well: there is a social fixation on being married even as less Japanese are doing so these days; social attitudes towards people who are divorced, or rather women who are divorced are also explored.
But i think most resonating for me is the reflection that we are nowhere near perfect beings. We try our best, we try to make things work, we persist and we trudge on even when we don't feel like. A wife can grow to stop loving her husband. A mother may not like her kid very much - at least not all the time. A woman may not necessarily need a man, or need to take care of one.
I think the book is a book of its time and space, and primarily reflects the fear and insecurity that this one japanese woman (and many others like her) have about a great number of things, but mostly of her womanhood, especially as is prescribed by a patriarchal and traditional society. The narrator is stripped from all of that – divorced from her unreasonable husband, struggling to care for her problematic child, and without a home to keep in order, she seems lost. What is she if not what she knows?
I think the distanced, impersonal tone of voice and seemingly banal smattering of life observations not only reminds me of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway but also lends to the growing sense of claustrophobia...of a certain panic that comes from wondering what's next (or if even there is anything that comes next that is less mind numbing than the ones before).
But ultimately, by the book's end, i get a sense of pensive optimism, that things will be alright even as they remain imperfect.
this book is also pretty special in that it was translated by the aunt of a friend.