Neil's Reviews > Territory of Light

Territory of Light was originally published in the Japanese literary monthly magazine between 1978 and 1979 with each chapter marking the months in real time. It is now being published in English translation in one instalment of multiple chapters. It won the inaugural Noma Literary Prize and Tsushima subsequently won many awards in her career. She died in February 2016.

The novel tells the story of a young woman separating from her husband and setting up a new life in a Tokyo apartment with her two-year-old daughter. The apartment has windows on every side and is filled with light, but the woman herself gradually falls into darkness.

I imagine reading this in monthly instalments would be a very different experience to reading it all in one go. Each instalment is only about 10 pages long and therefore does not take long to read. But reading the whole thing feels, to me at least, rather disjointed: there are jumps between the chapters that you probably would not notice if it was 4 weeks since you last read the book but which feel odd when coming in quick succession. And there are repetitions that are probably useful when reading over a year but not necessary when reading over a day. It has the feel of a book that should be edited a bit to give continuity and remove redundancy if it is to be sold as a single novel.

The writing style also seems to change as the story progresses. I am not sure if this is deliberate. It is very functional at the start, simply relating the story to the reader. But as the year progresses, it becomes more and more poetic. It could well be that this is purposeful and somehow reflects the unraveling of our protagonist’s mental state, but I am not sure about that. At times, I was reminded of more recent book like Eileen and Sorry To Disrupt The Peace. Those books contain far more in terms of bodily fluids/functions and it is not that the protagonist here is unlikeable in the same way, but there is something about the feel of the book that reminded me of these newer works.

I have to say that I did not really enjoy the first half of the book as I couldn’t engage with it and it seemed, quite frankly, rather dull. But the second half was far more absorbing so I am glad I did not give in to the temptation to put it down. But, overall, I can’t see my way to giving it more than 3 stars. Those who liked Eileen and Sorry… might enjoy this as a sort of retro, slightly more innocent version of those (think of how horror movies nowadays compare with horror movies of 50 years ago and it’s that kind of difference: those older ones were probably scary at the time but not to most people looking back from today).

My thanks to the publisher for a free copy in exchange for an honest review.