Territory of light

A young woman confronts life as a single mother in this graceful, eye-opening novel from Tsushima (1937-2016), one of the most influential feminists in Japanese literature. An unnamed radio archivist rents a light-filled Tokyo apartment with her unnamed two-year-old daughter after separating from her husband, Fujino, a deadbeat film student. Over the course of a year, the mother readjusts her routines, tentatively attempts to kindle a romance with one of her husband's tutoring students, and, most challenging of all, transitions to single parenthood. She experiences nightmares about her daughter dying, then guilt that some part of her wishes it were so; she longs to have her "old life back," yet does everything she can to make her daughter feel "keenly alive." "Why were children the only ones who ever got to melt down?" she wonders. As the separation from her husband becomes a divorce, the mother begins to find her footing with the assistance of a friend who offers to babysit. But even once the mother has embarked on a spur-of-the-moment solo trip to the seaside, she can't forget her daughter and finds "the physical distance between us allowed me a pillowy kind of peace." Equal parts brutal and tender, Tsushima's portrait of the strains and joys of motherhood is captivating. (Feb.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

This lovely, melancholy novel painstakingly documents a year in one young woman's life.A woman and her husband are looking for an apartment. It's not for them to share; her husband is leaving her but wants to find her a new place because, he says, "I won't be able to sleep at night knowing you're in some dump." The nameless young woman, who narrates Tsushima's (The Shooting Gallery, 1997) slim novel, eventually finds an apartment filled with light for herself and her young daughter. That might sound like a good augury, but the reality is more complicated. The novel's 12 chaptersoriginally published seriallydocument the narrator's struggle to build a new life. It's not a one-way journey. This is mid-1970s Tokyo, and divorce isn't exactly common: The narrator finds herself isolated from her old friends and determined not to ask her mother for help. She makes mistakesdrinks to excess, loses patience with her daughter, oversleeps, oversleeps again. The subject matter is partially based on Tsushima's own childhood: Her father, the celebrated writer Osamu Dazai, committed suicide a year after she was born. She has returned to the subject in several of her books, always with 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. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.