This book feels so current I didn't initially realize it was published in 1978. Loved the quiet and sensory mood throughout the story of a mother newly separated from her husband who struggles to settle into a new life. ( )

I was hypnotized by this book from the very beginning. I don't read many books about mothers -- is that strange? This was constantly tipping back and forth between scenes where I read, set at a comfortable distance from the narrator and her feelings, to scenes where I identified SO INTENSELY that I was awash with sympathetic guilt, exhaustion, anxiety, or quiet awe.

At the beginning of the novel, she separates from her husband and moves into an apartment with her two-year-old daughter. Over the next year and a half, she attempts to make a life for herself and her daughter, while untangling them both from her husband, and figuring out how to be a good parent to a toddler while she herself is struggling. The lack of support she has coupled with the judgements she faces from all sides, and her own judgements of herself leave her frequently feeling a bit untethered and adrift -- a stress a child can't help but pick up on. The ways she both accepts and rebels against responsibility for every aspect of her daughter's behavior -- that slides from apathy if not defensive rage to guilt and panic -- cannot help but be relatable to many mothers, whether or not the specific circumstances causing those reactions are familiar.

This was such an impulse purchase for me -- I had seen the cover image over and over on Instagram, but don't think I had even read any of the reviews. I am very glad to have discovered this one. A quiet, deeply empathetic novel. ( )

Reason Read: Asian (Japan) author challenge, ROOT since 2018. I read this now because of the Asian author challenge, Japan focus. Yūko Tsushima, was a Japanese fiction writer, essayist and critic. Tsushima won many of Japan's top literary prizes in her career, including the Izumi Kyōka Prize for Literature, the Noma Literary New Face Prize, the Noma Literary Prize, the Yomiuri Prize and the Tanizaki Prize.
I received this book in 2018 as part of the Indiespensible Subscription boxes from Powell's Bookstore.
This book is about a year in the life of a young single mother; there are 12 chapters. It starts in spring, her husband is leaving her and she is starting a new life in an apartment in Tokyo with her two year old daughter. The new apartment emits light from every angle but as the year progresses the light is slowly diminishing. The woman is confronting what she has lost and what she is becoming. She struggles with the challenges to parent her daughter. She begins to drink and then to have casual sex. At the end, she is leaving the apartment of light and moving to a new location with hardly any light. This book was written in serial monthly chapters from 1978 to 1979. Each chapter marks a month in real time. ( )

Another exploration of how shitty life is for an average Japanese woman with no particular resources or interests. This young woman is intent on keeping her daughter after her husband left and keeping him out of her daughter's life. ( )

Not bad, but not my thing--this was a little too restricted, and the prose was a little too monotonous. ( )