Yuko Tsushima was a prolific writer, known for her stories that center on women striving for survival and dignity outside the confines of patriarchal expectations.
Even after her passing in 2016, Tsushima’s literary legacy continues, with her novel “Woman Running in the Mountains” set to be republished in English by The New York Review of Books this month. The credit for Tsushima’s work appearing in English lies with translator Geraldine “Gerry” Harcourt, whose road to translating Tsushima’s early stories parallels the writer’s artistic conceits: a fiercely independent woman on the edges of society, determined to construct her own path.
Groundbreaking in content and style, Tsushima authored more than 35 novels, as well as numerous essays and short stories. However, without the dedication and loyalty of Harcourt, who forged a way alone in the tangle of international publishing to champion Tsushima’s work, novels such as “Woman Running in the Mountains” may have never been translated into English.
The translator came to Japan immediately after graduating from the University of Auckland in 1973, and at a time when non-Japanese residents were rare and openly regarded as outsiders, she worked as a commercial translator and freelancer to make ends meet as a single woman living on her own. Although literary translations were usually the province of university academics, Harcourt became deeply impressed with Tsushima — whose first novel, “Carnival,” was published in 1971 — and began translating her work on the side.
“It was the 1980s and no other translator was doing what she was doing, getting a Japanese woman author published in English without any university affiliation,” says Lucy North, a fellow translator and a close friend of Harcourt. “She was a total trailblazer. Self-funding all her literary translations, she went to book fairs by herself, relentlessly pitching Tsushima’s work until someone listened. ... She was really tenacious, just fierce and devoted to getting Tsushima’s work to a wider audience.”
Tsushima’s 1978 novel “Child of Fortune'' was published in English in 1986 by The Women’s Press, earning Harcourt the Wheatland Foundation's translation prize in 1990. “Child of Fortune” was followed by English translations of a collection of short stories titled “The Shooting Gallery” in 1988, and “Woman Running in the Mountains” in 1991, as Tsushima gained acclaim within the English-language literary world.
In the 1990s, Harcourt branched out to translate other Japanese authors appearing on the scene, such as “Requiem” by Shizuko Go and “No One’s Perfect” by Hirotada Ototake, but she continued to translate Tsushima whenever possible. Although the tastes of readers had shifted to newer talent, Harcourt was determined to showcase Tsushima’s versatility, which became more apparent in the writer’s later works.
“She knew Tsushima was absolutely world-class, unignorable, posited by some in Japan as a serious Nobel Prize candidate,” North says. “And yet somehow the English-language publishers who had published her had either all narrowed their focus or closed down. Tastes and fashions in the English-speaking world also appeared to have changed by the 1990s, prioritizing ‘quirky’ works of surrealism, and there appeared to be no market for Tsushima.”
Even after Harcourt received a cancer diagnosis in the early 2000s, forcing her to take long breaks from literary translation as financial demands and health complications took over, she remained committed to translating Tsushima. She faced her illness the same way she approached translation, with a fierce determination to find the best way forward. “She chose the way she lived and chose the way she died. ... Gerry had an exactness toward translation that she modeled in her approach to life. She was very demanding of herself to reach perfection,” says Yuko Matsuoka Harris, an interpreter, translator and close friend of Harcourt.
One of Tsushima’s novels, “Laughing Wolf,” was translated by Dennis Washburn and published in 2001, but little of Tsushima’s work materialized in English for the next 16 years. With Tsushima’s death in 2016, the pressure intensified for Harcourt, and when North heard that Penguin was “putting out feelers” for Japanese literature, she immediately passed on Harcourt’s contact. Penguin published Harcourt’s translation of “Territory of Light” in 2017 to great acclaim, winning Harcourt the Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize awarded by the Keene Center. Her translation of “Of Dogs and Walls” followed in 2018.
Harcourt passed away in 2019, and The New York Review of Books’ edition of “Woman Running in the Mountains” is a welcome continuation of her efforts to keep Tsushima in the literary limelight. Like Tsushima’s novel, Harcourt’s life was tinged with hardship but illuminated by unwavering independence and indefatigable resilience. “The last two years of her life were happy and hopeful, despite her illness,” North says, “because she knew she was taking steps to relaunch Tsushima’s legacy.”
“Woman Running in the Mountains” opens with an unmarried woman in labor, struggling to make her way on foot to the maternity hospital an hour away. For the 21-year-old Takiko Odaka, the journey to the hospital shimmers with light and beauty despite her pain. In mesmerizing prose, Tsushima renders Takiko’s experiences both tender and fraught in her characteristic weave of interior musings and exterior observations. It’s the first step toward emotional growth, as the novel poignantly chronicles one year in Takiko’s life as a new mother.
Michael Bourdaghs, a professor specializing in modern Japanese literature at the University of Chicago, says now is the time to consider Tsushima’s stories again, particularly her later works, and continue down the path paved by Harcourt.
“Tsushima is an enormously important yet underrated writer,” Bourdaghs says. “The latter half of her career is even more fascinating — she developed a global awareness of literature, of Japan’s place in the world, of history, and really started experimenting with different ways of writing fiction.
“To Tsushima, literature meant indigenous stories, oral traditions, looking for global connections between them and tracing through moments of intersection. ... There's this whole other side of her work, just waiting to be discovered.”
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