Yuko Tsushima, beauty & light, watery deaths, nothing short of salvation

"Death marks the failure of literature.'" —Yuko Tsushima

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…