 |
| Japanese author Yuko Tsushima |
Territory of Light (1979)
by Yuko Tsushima
Territory of Light, a pioneering work of "auto-fiction" (see Elena Ferrante, Karl Ove Knausgard and Marcel Proust) was published in Japanese in 1979 but didn't get an English translation until 2018, with a publication date in February of last year. It's been a breakthrough for Tsushima, who only has two books currently in print in English and available via Amazon. Tsushima died in 2016, so it seems fair to acknowledge the type of critical re-appraisal (or first-time appraisal) that results in books like Territory of Light getting translated in 2018.
Narrated by the author using "I" and "me" to describe events, Tsushima's version of herself: A recently semi-abandoned single mother working in a private library, is full of dark secrets, bluntly revealed. Tsushima the character and the the writer are both fearless in a way that is not something that I associate with Japanese fiction. What must contemporaries made of it at the time? Tsushima seems to have been decades ahead of her time as far as appreciation in the west, but with two translations in the past two years, surely there is hope for more books in the future.
Instagram