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Some books, like Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip, Jenny Offill’s Dept. of Speculation, and Carol Shields’s Unless, entrance from the first line. Territory of Light, written by Yuko Tsushima and translated by Geraldine Harcourt, originally published in Japan in 1979, worked the same magic on me:

The apartment had windows on all sides.

I spent a year there, with my little daughter, on the top floor of an old four-storey office building. We had the whole fourth floor to ourselves, plus the rooftop terrace. At street level there was a camera store; the second and third floors were both divided into two rented offices. A couple whose small business made custom gold family crests, framed or turned into trophy shields, occupied half a floor, as did an accountant and a branch of a knitting school, but the rooms on the third floor facing the main street happened to remain vacant all the time I lived above them. I used to slip in there some nights after my daughter had finally gone to sleep. I would open the windows a fraction and enjoy a different take on the view, or walk back and forth in the empty space. I felt as if I were in a secret chamber, unknown to anyone.

Reading Territory of Light functioned like my own secret chamber, a place to slip away even as I was reliably present should a toddler holler for me from down the hall. In its pages, I found a measure of private space where I could breathe.

Territory of Light came to me the way the best books do: pressed into my hands by a friend at just the right moment. It was April, and I was so lonely, so at my wit’s-end of solo parenting a toddler, I was willing to drive 75 miles for a coffee date. My friend stood at her open front door in the late morning bay light.

She fed me strawberry cake. Our talk was largely about my degraded quality of thought and the pain I suffered at my fractured, interrupted mother’s mind. I grieved a unified state of being. How could I write imaginatively and expansively when my mind was a tight complex of junk-filled compartments? I wept at her table. Through her open windows, the sheer white curtains waved in the breeze.

As we spoke, we gathered up my mind’s shards. One thought unspooled into another and my friend’s thoughts wove with mine, and mine with hers, until we fabricated something cohesive. She placed a skin serum and a paperback into my hands. She texted the link to the strawberry cake recipe. I crossed the street to my car, drove 75 miles back home, and arrived with time enough for a detour to the floral display at Trader Joe’s before picking up my son. Over the course of the next week, my problems remained as the peonies relaxed their tight pink fists.

“My real name is Satoko Tsushima,” Yuko Tsushima wrote in 1989, “but I never liked it.” Her mother, Michiko Ishihara, was methodical, a school teacher and a knitter interested in symmetry. In written form, the character for Satoko “is complete and closed, leaving no hint of an expansion.” This did not suit the young writer.

When the time came for me to think of my own pen name, every writer’s privilege, I chose Yuko, a simple character, but one which suggests movement toward the outside. And it means happiness.

An interesting choice for a writer who goes on to note (in a brief essay that further impresses upon me the luminosity of Geraldine Harcourt’s translation):

I have never written about happy women. This is not because I like unhappiness, but it comes from my firm belief that misfortune is not always bad. Happiness can spoil people. Happy people can lose sensitivity, and as a result they become poor in terms of human qualities.

On the contrary, people can become rich by unhappiness. Unhappy people are given a chance to discover true human nature. It’s like we realize a stone only after we stumble over it. I know it’s hard, but people can grow through hardships.

The recurring biographical detail one learns when researching Yuko Tsushima is that she was born in Tokyo in 1947 to one of Japan’s celebrated novelists, Osamu Dazai. When she was one year old, her father died by double suicide, drowning in a canal near his home with his lover.

My narrative interests lay less with a noteworthy event and more with everything that follows. Tsushima herself shared this sensibility; she told an interviewer:

We had to learn to survive the death of my father… I wrote because I wanted to find out what lay beyond the point where my father chose to stop.

Tsushima wrote thirty-five novels and many more short stories, many of which claimed Japan’s top literary prizes. Of her vast body of work, her earlier work is what’s available in English, a period during which she wrote about the experience of single mothers slogging through. More than one critic has compared her work to Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment.

But when the same interviewer suggested Tsushima’s work was part of Japan’s literary tradition of shishōsetsu or “I novels,” a “confessional” form that includes her father’s novels, she disagreed:

Really? I don’t feel that way. For me, a writer is someone who has a certain biographical experience from which they draw elements with a universal dimension so as to get beyond the limits of their own experience.

Or as she wrote in 1989:

I write fiction, but I experience the fiction I write. In that sense, they are not fiction anymore, but reality.

In Territory of Light, the unnamed narrator, in the midst of divorce from her husband, works as an archivist at a radio station where she often arrives late. Her toddler daughter has been obstinate dressing or a neighbor has knocked with a complaint of a leak, delaying breakfast and their departure. She races from daycare, to work, and back again. When the narrator or daughter falls sick, the narrator often relies on her mother for backup care or draws down her bank of paid days off. Funerals and deaths, passed on the street, dreamt, or overheard in passing, flood the pages.

“For all its apparent desolation,” Abhrajyoti Chakraborty writes in The New Yorker, “nearly every chapter of the novel culminates in a moment of edifying grace.”

It’s a book of maternal chiaroscuro. Sleep-deprived, the narrator wonders if some part of her wished her daughter dead, then pages later careens into awed gratitude. Holding her daughter’s small body in her arms, she’s amazed “that the blessing of my daughter being alive had been granted to the likes of me.”

Bright spots are rare, vivid, and embodied: a Sunday afternoon in the park, coming across an unexpected festival and lighting sparklers, a fleeting and genuine connection with another mother. Even that angry neighbor who complains of a leak leads to one of the novel’s most shimmering passages—brief, precarious, at once wondrous and banal:

I opened the door that led onto the rooftop and was the first to cross the threshold. I let out a cry of astonishment at the sight that met my eyes. Where there should have been a perfectly dry roof, water rippled and sparkled. A great expanse of clear water.

“The sea! Mommy, it’s the sea! Wow! Look how big it is!” […]

That night, I took off my shoes and had a high old time in the rooftop “sea” with my daughter. Though there was no way it could be dangerous, it was a little unnerving to venture into the expanse of water, and the uneasiness gave me a thrill. We splashed each other and played tag till we ended up soaked. The air was chilly on wet skin. However warm the days might be, it was still only the beginning of May.

In 1985, Tsushima’s young son drowned in the bath while she was in the next room.

“Despite your work's autobiographical quality,” the interviewer began—do I need to tell you he’s a Frenchman named Phillippe?—“it is never closed in on itself. On the contrary, it seems to open up, to unfold in space and time.” He mentions her book Pursued by the Light of the Night, which has not been translated into English and describes the death of a child. She answers:

This book is very special to me because I wrote it after the death of my son. I was very much at a loss, yet I knew that my experience was something countless others had suffered in the course of human history. So I decided to revisit a medieval story in order to conduct an imaginary dialogue with the woman who wrote it a thousand years ago. Pursued by the Light of the Night is a kind of conversation across time. I couldn't understand why my son had died. I wanted to question the past so as to understand the present. I told myself that my child, who was with me only a few short years, had perhaps known other births and would do [sic] again. He was my child only in passing. I imagined all sorts of other possible existences he might have had. I saw him in the children who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, among the Innocents whose massacre is recounted in the Bible. When you start thinking like that, time takes on a different meaning. It becomes possible to imagine life as it really is and understand its value.

Phillippe and Tsushima begin to speak about mysticism, reality beyond the material, about god, even. Yet your books don't strike me as the work of a religious mind, Phillippe says.

“Perhaps we understand the words differently,” she says:

For me, religion isn’t based on any hope for salvation. Just the opposite—religion arises from the understanding that there's no hope of salvation. And it is exactly because of the absence of salvation that literature exists.

One of my great discoveries of the summer was the Australian author Maggie MacKellar. In addition to her many books and a daydreamy Instagram account from her home on a merino wool farm on the east coast of Tasmania, Maggie writes a newsletter called The Sit Spot.

In the madness of long summer days at the end of which I would tumble into bed collapsed and ruined, I looked forward to reading Maggie’s letters. My summer was a grim trial, a slog, but Maggie’s writing softened me. There was a feeling of space as I read. I began to think this space is the quality I desire in literature at this point in my life. I live my days too often in a tight flurry of tasks, to do’s and obligations. Reading can offer air and space in which I may, at least briefly, unfurl, too.

I ordered Maggie’s first book, When it Rains, from a bookshop in Delaware. Like mine, it’s often termed a “grief memoir.” Like mine, it’s a book devoted with feverish determination to pleasure and joy. And Maggie’s prose is everything mine wants to be but better—intelligent and sensuous, luminous and earthy.

What I’m trying to say is her book returned me to beauty. Over the past two years, I’ve repressed this need and belief: that beauty is not superficial, not simply a desirable aesthetic. Beauty is a practice of observation, creation, and awe. Beauty is a way of being in the world. It begets hope. She writes:

“When I see beauty, I gasp, and in my gasping I’m forced to breathe. Life fills me and I’m somehow stitched together.”

And that reminded me of a line I’d read from Tsushima’s Woman Running in the Mountains, reissued by The New York Review of Books in February of this year with an introduction by Lauren Groff. The book opens with a young woman departing on foot for the hospital to give birth and follows her first year as a mother, filled as it is with intense pleasures and pains, the kind received through wide-open senses:

She was being told something through her body. She wanted to listen.

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