Save this article to read it later.
Find this story in your accountsSaved for Latersection.
It all begins with a strange apartment.
A newly separated woman with a small child are doing their best to start anew.
The after-hours are when isolation and darkness creep in.
Tsushima is no exception.
I have never written about happy women, she told theChicagoTribunein 1989.
Adversity, she felt, had its upside: People can become rich by unhappiness.
Unhappy people are given a chance to discover true human nature.
Her stories dont have much use for the second punch in.
He committed suicide with his lover when Yuko was 1 year old.
The I-novel appeared just after the turn of the 20th century and remains powerful in Japanese literature today.
(You might say it was an early form of autofiction).
What Tsushima and her early women characters undisputedly shared was their milieu.
Later in her career, Tsushimas work would broaden in style and subject matter.
Formally, she was increasingly influenced by the storytelling of indigenous groups like Japans Ainu and Australias Aborigines.
But its her work on single women that Americans know the rest remains unavailable to Anglophones.
Out of the 35 novels Tsushima has published in Japan, only 4 have been translated into English.
Night falls fast for the narrator ofTerritoryin the early months of her single motherhood.
It was my own lack of sleep that worried me, says the narrator.
But no matter how deeply under I might be, I would always hear my daughters wails.
The narrator briefly fantasizes about smothering her daughter to stop her cries.
In the morning, she wakes surprised that she is still alive.
As she rushes off to day care, she is overwhelmed by guilt.
Maybe some part of me wished my daughter dead, she thinks.
Why would I have dreamed of her dead body otherwise?
Even today, such sleep-deprived agonies strike us with the power of primal thoughts rarely voiced.
They pierce the heart of the Western slogan in vogue even then: that women can have it all.
Believe me, a former professor of her husbands tell her.
Nothing goes right for a woman on her own.
The narrator internalizes this panic.
These signs echo the message that being alone is a tragedy that can beget still more tragedy.
There is no cultural recipe for happiness to be found in the narrators situation.
So Tsushima had to create one.
What ultimately made her unique among her feminist peers was an unwillingness to punish her women.
InTerritory, this liberation from consequences plays out over and over.
The mother comes very close to being what wed call today an unlikable woman.
But Tsushima doesnt care, becauseshelikes this mother who is slightly askew.
She grants her well-being, instead of the misery she seems to be courting.
Perhaps Tsushima didnt punish her characters because she felt they were punished enough by society.
Or perhaps Tsushima didnt punish her characters because she would have been punishing herself.
Leaving is a way for her to sever ties completely with him and her old life.
It is the logical choice of a woman who has few options of any kind.
She is learning, at last, to be on her own.
