In an old Japanese folktale, set in a mountain region where a dim light can be seen late at night, a young man comes across a woman in the woods. She runs through the trees ‘as though she were running through the air’, and calls out to him twice. The mountains appear from afar as if ‘draped with purple clouds’. The story is retold in The Legends of Tono, and...
Yūko Tsushima’s fiction is often associated with the ‘I-novel’, a naturalistic, confessional form that emerged in the early 20th century, drawing on Japan’s diaristic traditions as well as Western realism. In recent years, since the reissue of Territory of Light in 2018, her work has been seen as prefiguring contemporary autofiction. Yet as Lauren Groff writes in her introduction to the new edition of Woman Running in the Mountains, it’s a mistake to insist on too biographical a reading of Tsushima’s work.
