Territory of Light

'Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality' Margaret Drabble

It is Spring. A young woman, left by her husband, starts a new life in a Tokyo apartment. Territory of Light follows her over the course of a year, as she struggles to bring up her two-year-old daughter alone. Her new home is filled with light, streaming through the windows, so bright you have to squint, but she finds herself plummeting deeper into darkness; becoming unstable, untethered. As the months come and go, and the seasons turn, she must confront what she has lost and what she will become.

At once tender and lacerating, luminous and unsettling, Territory of Light is a novel of abandonment, desire and transformation. It was originally published in twelve parts in the Japanese literary monthly Gunzo, between 1978 and 1979, each chapter marking the months in real time.

Tsushima evades any label, her fiction transcends gender to focus on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity. (Kris Kosaka Japan Times 2015-08-08)

Wonderfully poetic ... extraordinary freshness ... a Virginia Woolf quality (Margaret Drabble BBC Radio 3)