August is Women in Translation month. To celebrate, I’m recommending a beautiful Japanese novel – Territory of Light by Yūko Tsushima – which follows a year in the life of a young mother in Tokyo. It was originally published 45 years ago, in twelve monthly instalments in the literary magazine Gunzo, between July 1978 and June 1979.
Yūko Tsushima was the pen name of Satoko Tsushima, daughter of the celebrated novelist Osamu Dazai, who took his own life when she was one year old. Raised by a single mother, and a single mother herself, Tsushima returned repeatedly to mother–daughter relationships in her novels and short stories, which won all of Japan’s major literary prizes.
‘It takes extraordinary courage, particularly in a very traditional society like Japan, to write about these things at all,’ said Margaret Drabble in 1991. ‘And she writes about them with extraordinary freshness.’
In Territory of Light, a young woman, abandoned by her husband, moves into a new Tokyo apartment with their two-year-old daughter. The seasons revolve through twelve chapters as we follow her first year as a single mother, illuminated by dappled sunlight, blinding reflections off floodwater, neon street lamps and ominous explosions. It is a novel about isolation and desire, but also about personal strength and parenthood.
I have a personal connection and affection for this novel, because I worked with the New Zealand translator Geraldine Harcourt as she prepared the first English translation. Geraldine was a friend of Tsushima and had translated much of her work, but she was particularly keen for this novel – Tsushima’s masterpiece in her opinion – to be available to non-Japanese speakers.
‘My conversations with Tsushima helped me to be sparing with the English wording, to try to capture the uncertainty without putting a lot of paraphrasing around it.’
Geraldine’s translation was published by Penguin in 2018, two years after Tsushima died, and sadly Geraldine herself died the following year, in June 2019. It was a privilege to work with her. I can recommend all of her translations of Tsushima, especially the novels Territory of Light and Child of Fortune, but also The Shooting Gallery and Other Stories and a little edition of two short stories that we collaborated on called Of Dogs and Walls.
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A great recommendation for those who enjoy that style one often encounters in Japanese fiction - deliberately understated and reticent, yet also very detailed and precise. It’s a hugely evocative combination used to great effect to convey the intense, often off-kilter emotions of Tsushima’s female narrator as she struggles to navigate her new life as a single mother. Somehow it manages to be hauntingly sad yet also life-affirming. I found it crept up on me - I was surprised by the extent to which it got under my skin. A little gem.
Thank you for this recommendation! I added it to my list. Looking forward to reading it.