The Careful Craft of Writing Female Subjectivity

What sort of mother loses her child in the park? Or goes out drinking and leaves her child unsupervised at home? Or lets her child stroke the back of a drunk stranger? The mother in Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light does all of these things. And yet she dearly loves her daughter. Together they throw leaves at a “dazzling blue” sky and play on a flooded roof that through her daughter’s eyes becomes “the sea.” When the girl has a bad dream, the mother recites “magic words” to soothe her: “Nightmares, leave this child alone … Let her dream she’s dancing.”

was published from 1978 to 1979 as a series of 12 stories in the Japanese literary magazine that, once finished, were collected into a novel. Geraldine Harcourt’s English translation has recently been published in the United States. The novel follows a young mother and her 3-year-old daughter. At the