... elegantly translated ... Tsushima writes in prose so bare and vivid that even banal details acquire a visceral vibrancy ... What emerges is a story that searchingly inhabits the lives of women without sentimentality or self-pity ... In putting pen to the blank page, [Tsushima] has opened up a territory that feels, in some small way, like a bright room of her own.
... this short novel has a timelessness to it. The denial and dislocation are portrayed in a straightforward fashion, and the translation, by Geraldine Harcourt, is spare and unsentimental ... [Sexism's] blatant nature — and the fact that the young mother accepts it as normal — is jarring. Much more compelling are the internal conflicts that make up the bulk of this novel. There is a sense of inevitability as the year ends, and the woman takes a new apartment. Only walking distance from her light-filled sanctuary, the new space represents a new life, another understated step along the journey she has made.
... the brilliance of Territory is that Tsushima’s skilled attention to her narrator’s inner struggles ultimately asks the reader to feel empathy not just for one woman but also for a whole strata of women living with little societal support ... the episodes of the narrator’s life are, when read carefully, far from boring. There is something deeply seductive about being drawn into the intimate thoughts of a woman who otherwise would tell them to no one ... Tsushima’s gift is to provide insight into the mother’s difficulties without rendering her protagonist simply an oppressed victim.
A lonely book. It is also angry, unflinching, and sometimes ashamed, afraid ... has the subtle, harrowing shades of Marie Darrieussecq’s My Phantom Husbandand Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, though both were written decades later. Like these works, Tsushima’s novel chronicles the life of a woman who is in the process of reconstituting herself in the face of an absence. It is not a neat story of awakening or transformation but of the fearful joy of the unobscured horizon, of how the freshly unstructured life gapes with promise and paralysis alike ... an I-novel, a Japanese genre from the early twentieth century that now reads as a more beguiling, less embarrassed-sounding version of today’s autofiction ... In Tsushima’s unburdened territory, every corner is filled with light and there is nowhere to hide, for there need not be—not for those who seek illumination.
An uncannily subtle writer, Tsushima plays with light to point to obscurities ... Tsushima portrays the battle to keep going as a fight for life itself. Tsushima casts death as a recurring character who is always close to the action ... Where Ferrante is visceral in her portrayal of grief and disappointment, Tsushima is no less dark, but far more abstract.
Short and spare yet also luminous and profound ... This is a novel suffused with light. Some of it, such as the sunlight that streams through the apartment windows, is calming and energizing. Other sources prove blinding and disorienting for the woman and the reader ... Tsushima, who died in 2016, is a writer worth discovering. Deceptively simple and remarkably timely, her story of a marginalized woman trying to cope with the trials of life is certain to entrance a whole new readership and pave the way for further translations of her strangely mesmerizing work.
Fittingly, as a reader, it is sometimes hard to maintain a sense of direction; it’s this simultaneously muted and overwhelming feeling of instability that comes through in Tsushima’s book. Through it all, Mrs. Fujino remains an insightful and placid narrator ... Tsushima’s Territory of Light, for which she won the inaugural Noma Literary Prize, is a tender and relatable story, highlighting both the obstacles and highlights of a transitional stage in life. By the novel’s end, readers are left with the sense this mother and daughter will continue to learn and change together as they remake their life.
... billed as a novel, but that’s not exactly what it is. Rather, the book is a collection of linked short stories — or more accurately, a sequence of riffs, impressions ... Let me just say it plainly: I love this as a strategy. Among the issues with the traditional novel is (what let’s call) its novelness. By that, I mean the way plot can often feel like a chute in a slaughterhouse, herding us toward what is made to seem an inevitable denouement ... What makes this all so vivid is both the clarity of the language and the piercing acuity of Tsushima’s eye ... For Tsushima, the point (or one of them) is that life unfolds across the surfaces, that there is only so much we can know about each other or ourselves. That’s a tricky move when writing in first person, but the skill with which she pulls it off is one of the magnificences of the book ... quietly brilliant.
... invaluable exposure to a necessary account of the loneliness experienced by women within urban, patriarchal contexts; furthermore, the novel provides Tsushima’s longtime fans with closure for her premature death from lung cancer in 2016 ... A great deal of this novel’s strength derives from Tsushima infusing her characters’ interactions with the honesty and emotional integrity of her lived experience of single motherhood. The fragility with which the narrator embodies the role of her daughter’s protector and nurturer speaks platitudes to Tsushima’s revelatory capabilities, even as a young writer ... This promise of transformation is the final gift that Yuko Tsushima imparts on both her characters and her readers, a contribution to the living even in death.
Tsushima is honest about her narrator’s difficulties: she boozes, leaves the chores undone and hurls 'vile abuse' at her two-year-old daughter when woken in the night ... In this short, powerful novel lurk the joy and guilt of single parents everywhere.
Territory of Light broke taboos back then, but it feels in many ways like it could have been written today ... There is no cultural recipe for happiness to be found in the narrator’s situation. So Tsushima had to create one. Her characters were women on the outskirts of society, but unlike, say, Lucia Berlin, a contemporary who wrote about similar types but tended to end on bleak, Carver-esque notes, Tsushima gently allowed them to find their own sort of happiness. What ultimately made her unique among her feminist peers was an unwillingness to punish her women.
... elegantly translated by Geraldine Harcourt ... While Tsushima is a master at creating character and atmosphere in all of her work, the compressed form of the short chapters puts a welcome pressure on this novel’s quotidian dramas, giving each incident a sharp-edged significance. By isolating these episodes, Tsushima elevates them to something like parables, though their meanings remain as opaque to the narrator as they do to the reader ... In this way they resemble, at times, the stories of Amy Hempel and Grace Paley, which are rich in details that capture the uncanniness of everyday life. Also like Paley and some of her recent inheritors such as Rivka Galchen in her nonfiction book Little Labors or Lydia Kiesling in her recent novel The Golden State, Tsushima chronicles the difficulties of motherhood, but with a mordant self-awareness that tends to emphasize the protagonist’s identity outside of her role as a mother. Tsushima has an unorthodox approach to narrative that can be alienating at times—perhaps this is part of the reason my proselytizing for her work has so far not yielded many converts. Whether writing in first or third person, she brings a clinical tone to her depiction of her characters’ choices and psychological states.
Lovely, melancholy ... always has great sympathy and a nuanced respect for her characters. Tsushima’s prose is achingly elegant, well worth lingering over. But there’s also a quiet simplicity, even banality, to her style and what she allows us to see of her narrator’s life: domestic rituals like waking up, washing, shopping for groceries, cooking, and all the rest. Grace hovers above the banal and the transcendent alike ... Each chapter is as elegant and self-contained as a pearl or a perfectly articulated drop of water.
