The highly regarded Japanese novelist Yūko Tsushima, who died two years ago, drew on her own experiences for this 1979 novel, translated by Geraldine Harcourt, about a single mother struggling to build a life in Tokyo. Its 12 linked tales of the city are fine-grained to the point of mundanity – finding an apartment, discovering a leak, visiting a park – but in Tsushima’s hands they achieve a deceptive, luminous clarity.
The territory of the title is a flat “with an unusual layout in a dilapidated office building ... on a three-way intersection” – an unpromising but much-treasured first room of one’s own: “The two-mat bedroom was as small as a linen cupboard, and I felt at home.”
Tsushima is honest about her narrator’s difficulties: she boozes, leaves the chores undone and hurls “vile abuse” at her two-year-old daughter when woken in the night. But the two are peas in a pod – each spirited, a poor fit for conventionality, they jump in puddles and swing between screaming matches and fierce tenderness. In this short, powerful novel lurk the joy and guilt of single parents everywhere.
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