Review: 'Woman Running in the Mountains,' by Yūko Tsushima

Western civilization loves its embattled mothers. It takes a special relish in idealizing motherhood, only to see the women capsize in their attempts to live up to impossible expectations. Is this a universal claim?

"Woman Running in the Mountains," a novel by Yūko Tsushima, suggests not. Certain forms of criticism that mothers seem automatically to accept in Western literature glide off this work like Teflon. Which is not to say that the novel paints a rosy portrait of motherhood. There is a surface placidity to the prose that belies its heavy themes of domestic violence, alcoholism, and economic and social precarity.

Originally published in 1980 and translated into English in 1991, "Woman Running in the Mountains" has recently been reissued by NYRB Classics. The novel tracks the pregnancy and aftermath of Takiko Odaka, its 21-year-old protagonist. Takiko has been eking out an unremarkable life when she finds out that she is pregnant. That she is unmarried presents a complication, but she makes no attempt to alert the father to her condition, and decides, against family pressure, to go ahead and give birth to an illegitimate son.

Takiko's parents, we quickly come to learn, are practitioners of situational ethics. When they first learn of her pregnancy, they are filled with shame at the stigma and they urge her to either have an abortion or give Akiko up for adoption. On top of this, Takiko suffers frequent beatings from her lush of a father, whose rage at his poverty he takes out on his daughter.

Yet Takiko's mother sings a different tune and praises Akiko for being "clever" when Takiko starts receiving a monthly child allowance from the government. A string of temporary jobs follows, from ambassador for a cosmetics company to a more spiritually fulfilling job at a greenhouse.

The narrative, in a fine translation by Geraldine Harcourt, alternates between an omniscient narrator and close third person. Events, including annunciations, are stated with the matter-of-fact plainness of stage directions: Takiko "had given birth to a baby that no one had wanted to have, a birth to which she alone had consented. Regrets were not permitted," goes one line. The book's quotient of plainspoken to sensuous lines is remarkably even.

Other passages offer atmospheric, lovely descriptions, such as when Tsushima describes "three flakes stray[ing] into the storeroom, like insects on failing wings."

What gives the narrative its propulsive quality are its dreamlike, almost mystical sequences — distinguished by the cycle of seasons and birth — in which Takiko encounters twinned versions of herself, first in a maternity ward, and then in Akiko's nursery.

The novel begins with a dream of someone hailing Takiko from afar, and reveries laden with symbolism follow Takiko about from one location to another, from her parents' house — where she dreams of an ancestral home in the mountains — to the "mountains" of the hilly greenhouse that gives the novel its title.

Takiko never achieves escape velocity from her past, yet she comes to see the present as pregnant with possibilities. Other mothers and a coworker who has a child with Down syndrome ignite a series of awakenings for Takiko as a mother, daughter and woman growing into independence.

Rhoda Feng is a freelance writer in Washington, D.C.

Woman Running in the Mountains

By Yūko Tsushima, translated from the Japanese by Geraldine Harcourt.

Publisher: NYRB Classics, 288 pages, $17.95.