Yuko Tsushima: Territory of Light

Looking down at the stagnant green water, I could picture as in a dream or a film that spot as it had appeared back then, some fifteen years earlier: a spot clad in flowers and fruit trees, where the sunshine seemed to have congealed. It was bright and tranquil, disquietingly so. No one must ever know about this place that made me yearn to dissolve until I became a particle of light myself. The way that light cohered in one place was unearthly. I gazed at its stillness without once ever going through the gate.


However, the more of those gloomy, cramped apartments I looked at, the further the figure of my husband receded from sight, and while the rooms were invariably dark, I began to sense a gleam in their darkness like that of an animal’s eyes.


At the time, I had not yet taken in the reality of my father’s death, I understood that I would never see him again in this world, but because there was a room at home that was just as it had been when it was his. I had entered the world at more or less the same time as my father departed it.