📚 Territory of Light, Yūko Tsushima
- Posted: 2026-11-08
- 2 min
Series of vignettes into the daily lives of a mother going through a divorce and her young daughter. Recommended.
⚠️ Warning: Spoilers
The story is very atmospheric. There are lots of descriptions of dreams and of the effect of light. Lots of people die.
Tsushima does an excellent job exposing the protagonist. We feel what she feels.
I like the ambiguity about her behavior. Is she telling us (and herself) the whole story? Is she actually leading Sugiyama on? Is it really only her daughter dropping objects on the shop? It seems plausible that she’s behaving differently than she’s admitting to us, than she’s admitting to herself.
I also like that the story is very raw; we see the struggles of the imperfect mother. She’s neither poor victim nor monster, just dancing in between. There’s no explicit judgement, but I occasionally found myself surprised at my own judging her. The writing is balanced, authentic.
At first I thought I didn’t like the strong presence of dreams, especially when they appear to be only loosely related to the events. However, I don’t know if the story could have reached this depth without this window into her psyche.
But the more I think about what I just read, the more I come to appreciate it.
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