Yūko Tsushima is one of the most fascinating, and certainly one of the most undersung, Japanese novelists of the latter half of the 20th century. The handful of her works available in English (largely early-career texts) often center on single mothers raising young children in 1970s and 1980s Japan — circumstances, nota bene, to which Tsushima was no stranger, having raised two daughters on her own while pursuing her writing career. Tsushima’s thematic singlemindedness tends to dominate discussions of her work, with critics endeavoring to assign her books into one myopic genre or another. But whether Tsushima’s works are best considered as exemplars of the Japanese I-novel — a genre of confessional literature that typically reflects events and circumstances in the writer’s own life — or precursors of today’s autofiction seems beside the point.
Her prose is graceful, measured, and elusive, a strange blend of the documentary and the visionary — and, in fact, there’s something unremarkable about the depredations her protagonists and narrators experience. There’s little pathos in her work, little extremity of feeling — though there’s certainly extremity of thought. Tsushima’s protagonists are given to sudden analytical swerves, dramatic jukes and dives of intention and desire that often amount to acts of self-effacement. As the protagonist of Woman Running in the Mountains (recently reissued by NYRB Classics in a translation by the late Geraldine Harcourt) reflects, true freedom might only be possible sans attachment. “She just wanted to be tough and free to move,” Tsushima writes. “A state that knew no emotion. To be allowed to exist without knowing emotion.”
Published in Japan in 1980, Woman Running in the Mountains is the longest and most expansive of Tsushima’s works available in English. The novel’s protagonist is Takiko Odaka, a 21-year-old living with her bickering mother, her ineffectual younger brother, Atsushi, and her physically abusive father in a dim, cramped home that faces onto a twisting, narrow alleyway in a peculiarly sunless suburb of Tokyo. The scenes that capture Takiko’s relationship with her father are vivid, violent, and almost repertorial in effect. Typically, we learn “she’d let fly with some retort … which enraged him even more and always drove him to punch and kick and pin her down on the tatami, while she pulled his hair and bit his shoulder and scratched his face and neck and screeched.” The flat sequentiality of the narration is typical of Tsushima’s style — moments of violence, surreal interactions, and strange reveries crop up often and pass on by, so to speak, largely unremarked and uninterpreted.
A divine carelessness marks Tsushima’s writings, and part of what makes Woman Running in the Mountains such a satisfying entry in her body of work is that this tone has a clear and legible source. Territory of Light, another of Tsushima’s novels of single motherhood, concerns a slightly older unnamed woman, just divorced, and her three-year-old daughter. The novel’s narrator is harried, plagued by the wilful moods of her daughter and her tireless questioning — its mood, like many of Tsushima’s books, Woman Running in the Mountains included, is one of exhaustion. But the latter book’s decidedly younger protagonist grants its carelessness a more official status — it’s the muddle of youth as much as parenthood that gives the book its meandering sensibility.
For her part, Takiko seems to be constitutionally careless, prone to dreamy obsession. The fact of her pregnancy occurs to her only gradually, a strangely distanced, piecemeal revelation: “The fetus had already grown quite big when it dawned on her that the changes in her body added up to pregnancy.” She misses the deadline to get an abortion precisely because she’s so preoccupied with her body’s changing form — “while time slipped by, she couldn’t bring herself to think at all practically about an abortion.” Even once it becomes clear that Takiko will have her baby, her mother pressures her to put the presumptive child up for adoption, though Takiko steadfastly ignores her. Even as her child’s eventual existence curtails her independence radically, saddling her with debts and recurring payments that prevent her from moving out of her parents’ home, Takiko clings unwaveringly to the child.
There’s not much action in the novel, which is understandable given its scope and Takiko’s own sense of being adrift. As the months pass, Takiko moves her son, Akiko, from one daycare to another; takes up a lover named Kawano, whom she sleeps with while Akiko gurgles in the next room; briefly works in a noodle shop and then as a door-to-door saleswoman, peddling makeup that no one seems interested in; and frets over her son’s umbilical hernia, a disconcertingly vermicular squiggle that throbs palely (and painlessly) near Akiko’s groin.
Eventually, Takiko’s wanderings as a saleswoman bear unexpected fruit. She begins to work at a plant nursery where she meets Kambayashi, an older man with a wife and a young son with Down syndrome. (After Tsushima’s father, the novelist Osamu Dazai, committed suicide when she was one-year old, her mother raised her, an older sister, and an older brother with developmental disabilities on her own.) Their friendship, an uneasy blend of the parental and the nascently sexual, becomes the focus of the last third of the book, coming to a head when, on a work trip, Takiko visits the nursery’s mountainside greenhouses for a few days. In fact, if Woman Running in the Mountains may be said to have climax, it might be the moment when, at the end of the trip and a night of drinking, Takiko and Kambayashi, alone in the covered bed of a truck in the middle of a rainstorm, stop themselves just before consummating their relationship.
In fairness, however, it’s really Kambayashi who pulls back. One aspect of the novel that drifts in and out of focus is Takiko’s growing grasp of desire. After her sexual encounters with Hiroshi Maeda, an old coworker and the father of her child, Takiko had always felt a desire “to part quickly from him.” Her detached analysis yields an interesting observation:
“Maeda’s desire must be released with no resistance. Though she couldn’t really have said why, Takiko responded to a man’s desire with sympathy. She could think of it only as pitiful, and thus not for her to violate. Maeda’s desire seemed somehow not to belong to Maeda himself.”
Male desire is brutish, of course, but also pitiful, extrinsic, and strangely weak — not inherently flawed so much as misguided or ill-conceived. In contrast to her moments with Maeda, as Takiko lies beside Kambayashi near the book’s end, she experiences something like a freshet of élan vital, which she can only compare to “the flood of green she’d seen that day” in the nursery. “What was rapidly rising in her own body, she felt, was the excess of green.”
Greenness — or viriditas, what the medieval abbess Hildegard of Bingen conceptualized as the greening power of nature, an outwardly blooming vitality, the photosynthesis of the soul — is a continuous presence in Tsushima’s works. Fulgurous descriptions of nature stipple her texts, as though the greening world had been zeroed in on or brought suddenly to bay, caught static, stunned, and shimmering. Tsushima’s writing seems to slow down in these moments, meeting the vegetable world in its own time. A looseness overtakes the novel when the natural world begins to creep in, a bagginess that provides at once an escape from the leaden immediacy of motherhood and the constraints of consciousness as traditionally conceived.
Estrangement is one of Tsushima’s constant themes. After giving birth, as she drowses in her hospital room, Takiko seems to experience a logical gap. “Yes, the fetus that had been growing there until last night was gone,” we read. “But she was still far from confident in the notion that she had a baby.” There is something ghostly, something haunted about pregnancy, evident even in the book’s opening paragraph. Pain is a phantom, and a constant. Later, Takiko equates the experience of breastfeeding with a medical procedure — it’s “as though she were sticking a hypodermic needle into her own flesh each time she gave the baby her breast.”
This world of aches and pains, which feed off of one another, which can’t all be appeased at once — as Takiko realizes in the passage described above, the only relief from the ache of her swollen breasts is offered by feeding Akira, which in turn creates a pain of its own — is to a certain extent absurd, a purgatory of reflexive suffering:
“Takiko turned her face again to the window on her left. She tried to roll over in bed, but there was a dull ache which she couldn’t quite identify pooled in her lower abdomen and extending into her legs, and to shift even one leg sent such intense pain through her whole body that she couldn’t move. She tried feeling her own breasts under the futon. They were her familiar breasts, their usual size and not at all sore.”
The note of the Kafkaesque here is obvious — we seem to be with Gregor Samsa, recently transformed and attempting to divine the nature of his curious new form and its attendant modes of pain. And as with Kafka, there is something perpetually probing about Tsushima’s prose, something horror-stricken — it’s as though the writing itself were constantly afraid of stumbling on some fresh new terror, pressing its fingertips to something terrible, and terribly new.
Large chunks of the novel are given over to logbook entries from Akira’s nursery. Takiko’s entries and the nursery staff’s blend into the same banal impressionism, listing nap times and bowel movements and other trivia. The minimal entries are an intentional slog to read — just as they must have been a slog to copy out, to live. In many ways, Woman Running in the Mountains is a book about exhaustion — denser than Territory of Light, the text reclaims the mimetic fallacy, dragging things out and, in the process, seeking to represent the full force of parental tedium.
This interest in physical pain and tedium is clearly related to Tsushima’s subject matter — pregnancy, motherhood— though it’s also tied ineluctably to her visionary tendencies. Dreams and visions crowd the pages of Woman Running in the Mountains, breaking up the narrative and providing denatured pauses, while Tsushima’s descriptions themselves often bleed into an associative wash, as when she imagines Akira’s ever-present cries feathering out into distinct voices. “How many voices were there?” Tsushima writes. “She would start counting as if unraveling strings from around her body. Soft, transparent strings.”
It’s not so much that the visionary aspects of Woman Running in the Mountains, so closely tethered to the novel’s depictions of nature, offer Takiko an oblique form of freedom. After all, natural phenomena have a way of placing one firmly back within the confines of one’s body (as the novel’s penultimate line curiously notes, “[Takiko’s] body was in the midst of midsummer”), and the visionary itself can often end up intensifying pain and depredation (recall the hypodermic sting Takiko experiences when breastfeeding). Rather, Tsushima’s novel suggests that experience itself is rarely as hidebound as we like to believe, and offers up its mysteries — those moments when it frays, diffuses, and breaks down, disclosing new angles and fresh vistas — to any seeker, no matter how harried.
[Published on February 22, 2022 by New York Review Classics, 273 pages, $17.95 paperback. With an introduction by Lauren Groff.]