'unhappy people are given a chance to discover true human nature': the beauty of salvation in Tsushima Yuko's Territory of Light

"We live our lives as a constant layering of personal experiences—falling in love or losing our relatives... But those experiences don’t exist independently of [the temporality of] reality. It seems to me...that you’re extremely attentive to the relationship between personal experience and the real world.  You don’t veer off into the world of the imagination, nor are you interested in a simplified version of reality, depicting time as a sort of ‘other,’ cut off from the self. And you show that this is precisely how actual human beings live their lives."

It’s the fondness for the everyday that allows her to articulate these larger emotional truths that transcend time and space. Yuko finds beauty in unlikely things—a flooded roof, or the bright colors of an exploding chemical factory. It is an existence in which, as in so many lives, the good and the bad are muddled together. When the girl has a bad dream, the mother recites “magic words” to soothe her: “Nightmares, leave this child alone … Let her dream she’s dancing."

"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"...

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

"in part because it was a very difficult experience. But it was also a formative experience because it forced me to come face-to-face with death. I guess you could even say it shaped my very sense of self. And because it so perfectly captured my own thoughts about the whole thing, I used a quote from your book O Dreams, O Light! in the epigraph to Happening: “I wonder if memory is not simply a question of following things through to the end.”

"That being said, I think the truth is something you can never arrive at. Rather, it is perpetually fleeing from you. So the point is not to try and represent it in a fixed form, but rather to search for the words that most closely approximate the actual shape of ‘ÊTRE,’ ‘to be.’ What’s important is the process of closing in on the truth, because whenever you say that ‘this’ is the truth, that’s already false. From that, some might conclude that the truth does not exist, or that there is no point in pursuing it, but they would be wrong."

'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 they own experience.

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. 

In the present age, in which mothers are still often seen as monsters or angels, this portrait of an imperfect mother who strives to provide a good life for her child feels painfully relevant.