It was my local independent bookseller who recommended I read Territory of Light. She knows of my interest in Japan and we’d been talking about Murakami’s novels when she pointed out Yuko Tsushima’s story.  It was initially published in 1979 in twelve monthly installments in a Japanese literary magazine and now appears in a new translation by Geraldine Harcourt.

The short novel is narrated by a young woman who, when her husband walks out, is forced to raise her young daughter alone in Tokyo.  They move to a tiny, light-filled apartment above a shop to begin their new life.  There’s nothing rose-tinted here about the experience. The young mother drinks too much, yells at her daughter, and generally struggles to stop her life unraveling, but somewhere in the telling of this story something heroic emerges from the mundane details of an ordinary life.  Not much happens but there’s truth in the little that does.