Japanese · 1947–2016
Tsushima was one year old when her father, Osamu Dazai, drowned himself with his lover in a Tokyo canal, and she spent a career refusing to be read through him. Her brother, who had Down syndrome, died when she was twelve. She married, had two children, divorced, and wrote about single mothers with an unsentimental attention that had no precedent in Japanese fiction: the logistics of childcare, the tedium, the erotic life, the dreams. Territory of Light was serialised monthly through 1978 and 1979, a chapter a month for a year. She won the Tanizaki, Noma, Kawabata and Yomiuri prizes, worked with Ainu oral literature, taught in Paris, and was widely expected to be the next Japanese Nobel laureate when she died of lung cancer at sixty-eight.