Yuko Tsushima

The deeper you get in Yuko Tsushima's collection of linked stories, Territory of Light (1979, Harcourt tr 2018) the more obvious it becomes that the narrator is a deeply troubled young woman and a frighteningly irresponsible mother. At first our sympathies are all w her and she seems like a brave young mother making the best of things as she moves w her 3-year-old daughter to a new apt. But that sympathy for the character may arise from a few factors: our predisposition to think kindly and sympathetically of a single mom in a fix, our expectations about based on numerous single-mom narratives in print and film and tv, and even our presuppositions about Japanese culture. Over the course of reading these stories tho we check and abandon these presuppositions. We see that the mother takes completely irresponsible actions w her daughter- letting her run off and be out of sight for hours in a park, leaving her alone while going out for a night of drinking w a friends, to cite just two examples, and we also see her personality flaws excessive drinking, high-risk sex. She seems indifferent to or unaware of the signs her daughter is showing of distress - acting out at daycare, hurling objects from the roof of their building - and, to her credit, YT does not take the easy path of blaming the ex: yes, he is in a new relationship, but it seems their breakup was a mutual decision and he is a least to a degree still involved in their daughter's life. So this collection is subtle and defiant of convention - and rich w mystery, as there are many moments when there is ambiguity about the borderlines between actual experience, the narrator's dreams (there are many), and the narrator's delusions (abetted by alcoholism and perhaps by her emotional distress).

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