Lesley Downer
A Single Woman
Territory of Light
By Yuko Tsushima (Translated by Geraldine Harcourt)
Penguin Classics 122pp £9.99 order from our bookshop
As Territory of Light opens, the unnamed narrator is newly separated from her husband, Fujino, and looking for an apartment. But she can’t break the habit of deferring to Fujino, who drags her around to more and more expensive places. She feels utterly defeated: ‘If I could live with my husband I didn’t care where, and without him everywhere was equally daunting.’
Then, at the library where she works, she overhears a poem: ‘Quick now, give up this idle pondering! And let’s be off.’ She realises with a shock that it’s time to take control of her life. On her own she finds the perfect apartment, tiny but suffused with light. She moves in, bringing her two-year-old daughter with her, and life as a single mother begins.
Yuko Tsushima is considered one of Japan’s most important modern female writers. But she is also known as the daughter of the brilliant and dissolute nihilist author Osamu Dazai, a ‘Japanese Albert Camus’ whose novels captured the mood of postwar Japan and who committed ‘love suicide’ in spectacular
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'Cruickshank’s history reveals an extraordinary eclecticism of architectural styles and buildings, from Dutch Revivalism to Arts and Crafts experimentation, from Georgian terraces to Victorian mansion blocks.'
William Boyd on the architecture of Chelsea.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/where-george-eliot-meets-mick-jagger
'The eight years he has spent in solitary confinement have had a devastating impact on his mental health ... human rights organisations believe his detention is punishment for his critical views.'
@lucyjpop on the Egyptian activist and poet Ahmed Douma.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/ahmed-douma
'We nipped down Mount Pleasant ... me marvelling at London all over again because the back of a Vespa gives you the everyday world like nothing else can.'
Ali Smith writes this month's diary.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/temple-of-vespa