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Sometimes, their quick, thin heads forced me back inside, where I read Tsushima on the fold-out bed. I wrote in the garden, facing a hedge of iris bushes from which appeared the heads of green snakes. We were staying at a house on top of a hill, with a dark dining room crammed with furniture, where our hostess, who lived across the garden, left us plates of cookies on the oak cabinet. I read Territory of Light during a work retreat outside of Verona. What is important about the work of noticing and collecting for a writer? Is it connected to an impulse toward preservation in times of great change, personal and collective? You once mentioned-this has stayed with me-that every writer builds up over time a “treasure chest” of things noticed and remembered, a collection of trinkets from which to draw. Objects in your novel seem arranged as if to slow the disappearance of things. The objects in your novel are so sensually specific-like the photograph with which the novel begins, which seems to haul the story of M out of the past. Both are doing the things that writers do: noticing, exploring, collecting, probing material objects for the pasts they carry with them. Elena stitches together a stranger’s journal fragments Nunu hones stories in the company of a famous writer.
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Both our protagonists seem to be gathering, slowly and painfully, what it takes to beat back loss, to find meaning in what’s shifting. There’s a subtle but present connection: suspended time is also the time of writing, when we’re in the world intensely but not entirely, hovering over it, dreaming. The sensitive quality of dilated time is captured so beautifully by Nunu’s childhood invention of a “white city” on the ceiling. You’ve just moved, so maybe you’re thinking about mapping intimate space in a more practical way. We’re also forced to explore the intricacies of our homes and neighborhoods people are buying loaf pans, pets, plants. As the pandemic drags on this winter, I think we’re encountering a collective experience of this the world is changing rapidly, and we can’t responsibly imagine what it will look like when it’s over.
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Fleeing from pasts they can’t accept or integrate, they find themselves in strange, suspended time. Paris is foreign to both our protagonists, who wash up there of their own volition. If our novels share a preoccupation with identity, grief, and memory, they also map-in different ways-the negotiation of the self within a city. I think of Nunu sitting at a bistro watching the light “sweeping the tables inch by inch in dusty stripes,” knowing she’ll think of this time “as in a dream.” Walking on the Ceiling also follows a character through a period of change, and it’s in dialogue with a city. I loved Territory of Light for its gorgeous, troubling images, but also for the way it maps a period of becoming onto a certain space or territory. But she finds the rooftop drained and coated with reflective, waterproof paint that burns the eyes “as if we were crossing a snowfield, or adrift at sea.” Both our debut novels seem to be about characters trembling at an edge, consumed by the rawness of change. When a pipe bursts, flooding the rooftop of the narrator’s building, she goes up thinking she’ll splash in the water with her daughter. It’s so much more interesting, figuring for the emotional experience of transition, when we’re raw, not in control, becoming other than the selves we’ve been.
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In the novel, light is not the respite from the Paris winter I was craving. It’s tuned to the rhythms of a city (Tokyo) and a life in crisis, or a period of dramatic, painful change. Territory of Light is like nothing I’ve read before. Finishing it now makes me want to start a conversation we’ve been planning-an exchange about writing and place, and about how identity and memory can be explored topographically. The sky had been leaden for weeks, so I started Yuko Tsushima’s Territory of Light with hopeful longing -also because I tend to love the books you recommend. The letters took on a life and direction of their own, as we found our way into a conversation about the writing life and the pleasures of making fiction out of spaces and encounters. The project was to resuscitate the letter form, on the topic of how our first novels engage with the urban space of Paris, where we both live and work.