Goodreads Monday is a weekly meme that was started by @Lauren’s Page Turners. This meme is quite easy to follow – just randomly pick a book from your to-be-read list and give the reasons why you want to read it. It is that simple.

This week’s book:

Territory of Light by Yuko Tsushima

Blurb from Goodreads

Territory of Light is the luminous story of a young woman, living alone in Tokyo with her three-year-old daughter. Its twelve, stand-alone fragments follow the first year of her separation from her husband. The novel is full of light, sometimes comforting and sometimes dangerous: sunlight streaming through windows, dappled light in the park, distant fireworks, dazzling floodwater, desaturated streetlamps and earth-shaking explosions. The seemingly artless prose is beautifully patterned: the cumulative effect is disarmingly powerful and images remain seared into your retina for a long time afterwards.

Why I Want To Read It

Happy Monday everyone! I know, Monday is not the favorite day of most but, nevertheless, I hope you are having a great day and a great start to the week. After all, a new day means a new opportunity to start over again. I do hope you are all doing well amidst the uncertainties we are all wrapped in right now.

In what has developed into a blogging ritual, I usually open my blogging week with a Goodreads Monday update. I am in the midst of reading the best works of of Japanese literature. As such, I have been featuring Japanese works I want to read these past weeks. For this week’s update, I am featuring a name I have never encountered before yet has piqued my interest. I did encounter Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light before but I barely paid attention to it. Little did I know that it is a book considered as a must-read in the ambit of Japanese literature. Just today, I came across another list that enumerated it as a must-read.

However, it was more than its being listed as a must-read that caught my interest. The novel’s premise also piqued my curiosity. The novel is also in the form of the I-novel (Japan’s version of the semiautobiographical novel). And also just learned that Tsushima is the daughter of Osamu Dazai, a popular Japanese novelist. Unfortunately, I have yet to read some of his well-known works such as The Setting Sun. I hope to indulge in the works of father and daughter soon.

How about you fellow reader? What work by a Japanese writer do you have in your reading list? What made you add it to your list? I hope you could share your answers in the comment box. For now, have a happy Monday!

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