A Review of Yuko Tsushima’s “Territory of Light”
The Margins
The most notable thing about the latest translation of the book Territory of Light by the late Yuko Tsushima (a pen name for Satoko Tsushima) is that there are no margins in the text. This Picador edition has no space for you to jot down notes. Instead, the story itself is, in its way, in the margins. This is pretty à propos, especially for the time it was written in — the late ’70s. The story concerns a young lady living in Japan on her own with a three-year-old daughter, her husband relatively nowhere in sight, as she rents an apartment for a year. Well, that young lady might as well have existed on the margins of society, especially for the period of its setting and the book’s writing. Though Tsushima never considered herself to be a feminist writer by all accounts, this is a remarkably feminist story — a Japanese telling of Kramer vs. Kramer, which came out at virtually the same time as this novel. (Territory of Light was published in book form in 1979 but had been first published in monthly installments between mid-1978 to mid-1979 in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzō.)
In keeping with the theme of marginalia, it is vital to note that nowhere in this slim volume of 183 pages is the name of the female narrator nor her daughter is ever mentioned. All we know is that her husband’s surname is precisely the same as the office building her apartment rests in — Fujino. (The pair are separated, not yet divorced.) In this way, the narrator is almost invisible to society. In fact, throughout this short novel, she gets advice for other characters telling her to rejoin with her husband, that trying to make life alone as a single mother will lead to nowhere but heartache and ruin, financial or otherwise. She is supposed to and expected to reunify with her husband, even though he has abandoned her for another woman, shows up at ill-opportune times, and is absent at mediation sessions designed to save the marriage.
Territory of Light is broken up into 12 chapters, each for a month of the year that the novel takes place. It feels like a series of interconnected short stories that congeal to make up a novel — which is kind of its failure as a piece of art. The stories are fragmented, and filled with the day-to-day mundanities as looking after a daughter who is prone to throwing tantrums, drinking and enjoying social times with friends, and putting up with the landlord and the people who work in her building who think that her apartment is the source of leaks and whatnot. In its way, there’s nothing special about Territory of Light. No stable new boyfriends are waiting in the wings to zip our heroine off to new and noble places — though this is not something that I was expecting would happen. It’s that Territory of Light is just the story of a woman and her daughter trying to survive life’s ordinariness and make a separation work. The end. Pretty snooze-inducing stuff, especially when we hardly see any of the male character who is the source of all the novel’s hand wringing.
A lot of Territory of Light feels as though it is padded out — even at its own brisk length. The main character has vivid dreams, but they don’t seem to mean anything in the text of the rest of the novel. They just feel as non-sensical and oppressive as the life that the main character is living. A lot of the novel sees the main character trying to get to work while stopping over at her daughter’s daycare and trying to do this on time. At some point, it became apparent to me that the main character did not own an alarm clock — which would have done wonders for the character’s punctuality. And the other thing that stuck out with me while reading this novel was the fact that the three-year-old daughter often talks at a much higher level than a three-year-old probably should. In the end, there are bits of Territory of Light that don’t strike the reader as being particularly realistic, even though Tsushima was drawing upon her own experience as a single mother in writing it.
All in all, for the cleverness of not having margins in this book, I found Territory of Light to be wanting and weak. As already alluded to, the husband of the main character seems to be flighty and doesn’t seem to have any other motive aside from being a bad guy at any given segment of the book. We don’t get a sense of why the female narrator doesn’t even want to grant him visitation rights, even though he claims that he cannot afford child support. We simply don’t get enough of a portrait of the marriage to understand why it fell apart or what attracted the main character to the man in the first place. There’s a lot left unsaid in Territory of Light — too much. It could have benefitted from some colouring between the lines.
Still, one must look through a lens of when the book was written, and you can admit that it was brave for Tsushima to not be writing about the nuclear family at the time of which she did. It was a particularly topical book for its time (and perhaps still is), and probably very courageous for a book such as this to exist when it did. However, the book does feel rather rudimentary and half complete. Seeing that it was originally published as stories in monthly installments, Territory of Light works best if you take it in bite-sized pieces and don’t think of the overarching accomplishment too much. It’s meant to be a series of snapshots of an imperfect woman trying her best to be a good mother on her own with no father figure in sight. Taken as such a collection, written in the late ’70s, Territory of Light is an interesting, if imperfect, work of Japanese feminism set in the margins of society. You can’t add to that, particularly because there’s nowhere to write notes to yourself in the pages of this book.
Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light was published by Picador on March 31, 2020.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
