Territory of Light

by Tsushima, Yuko, Harcourt, Geraldine | Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Published 04/04/2019 by Penguin Books Ltd (Penguin Classics) in the United Kingdom as part of the Penguin Modern Classics series
Paperback | 128 pages
129 x 196 x 14mm | 104g

Selected by Mike Ward from Badlands Records as one of his favourite Japanese novels of all time. 

Mike says 'I think she was a fantastic writer and anything you can find in English translation is worth tracking down. This short novel is a good place to start. Incidentally her Father was the famous novelist Osamu Dazai, although she never knew him as he committed suicide when she was just one year old. His books are essential reading too.'

'Wonderfully poetic...extraordinary freshness...a Virginia Woolf quality' Margaret DrabbleIt 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