Yuko Tsushima "Of Dogs and Walls"

“I write fiction, but I experience the fiction I write,” the Japanese writer Yuko Tsushima wrote, in 1989. “In that sense, they are not fiction anymore, but reality.” Tsushima, who died in 2016, was the daughter of the novelist Osamu Dazai, who committed suicide when Tsushima was barely a year old. In her novels, the protagonist is often shadowed by a death in the family—an event that, because of its suddenness, can never be mentioned. — From “The Overlooked Autofiction of Yuko Tsushima” by Abhrajyoti Chakraborty.

 

Yuko Tsushima’s two stories,  “Of Dogs and Walls,” and “The Watery Realm” are both puzzling and very readable. Both stories (which appear in a single short volume) include a mother, a daughter, and a brother, and a totally missing father, but the identities and relationships of these individuals are very different in the two stories. In both stories, a house or apartment and its garden or surroundings play a big role in the minds of the characters, which I find very relatable.

Here is one such house in the title story:

“The old house was old indeed: built by her grandparents before the war, it had survived the air raids that devastated much of Tokyo. Feeling sentimental on hearing that it was due to come down, the daughter had got out her camera, a hand-me-down from a cousin, and taken a number of photos. It was only when she saw them developed after the move that she noticed the whole house was listing. It had such a lean it looked ready to give way at the slightest push; she wondered how she’d been unaware of it till now. There really was nothing for it but to knock the old place down, she conceded, which seemed to put her regrets to rest. For a long time, though, she constantly returned to the old house in her dreams.” (p. 34)

 That was the outside, here is the inside:

“The children weren’t told how their mother had located the new property. But she must have been delighted to say goodbye to the slug-infested kitchen, with its cave crickets and its mice scrabbling in the ceiling, and to the cold dark privy, at long last.” (p. 38)

The condition of houses also plays a role in the other story:

“With a small child and a baby in the house, I had to fetch water many times a day, no matter how sparingly I used it. If everybody had been in the same situation, I could have resigned myself to it, but ours was among the few houses in those days still relying on a well; and, as if to rub in the drudgery, it was a communal well at that. If only we’d had a yard with a private well, then as long as it didn’t rain I could have done the laundry there in peace and quiet, and we could have washed our hands and feet at the well side. I expect I wouldn’t have minded that, as I was accustomed to it in my childhood. It wasn’t so much the cramped conditions that I resented, though. Those I was prepared for. This was Tokyo, after all; I was no longer in the provinces.” (p. 12)

And a better house that the narrator moves to:

“The old house I had decided to make our home was at the end of a lane, next to a graveyard. It was ideal for keeping to ourselves and not being bothered. It had running water, naturally, and indeed a bath, which not even my brother’s house had. I put in flower beds. The flowers were such a treat, each an eyeful of colour.” (p. 18) 

There’s much more to each of these short stories, which mainly focus on psychological sketches of the mothers and daughters, but I just wanted to focus on the interesting portrayal of houses in them. I know very little about either Osamu Dazai or his daughter Yuko Tsushima, but I am beginning to learn more about their literary accomplishments and reputation. 

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