Woman Running in the Mountains by Yuko Tsushima

For an instance Takiko closed her eyes and pictured herself holding a baby lightly to her breast and running at top speed. This was the way she had gone on imagining herself, while her mother's crying and her father's shouting echoed around her, ever since her mother had found out she was pregnant. At school she hadn't actually liked running at all, yet now she couldn't stop seeing this image of herself. It was not that she was running away. She just wanted to be tough and free and to move. A state that knew no emotion. To be allowed to exist without knowing emotion.

Early one winter morning, Takiko rises and finds that her water has broken. She gets up and calls herself a cab to the maternity ward while her mother, father, and brother sleep. She is too young to have a child, they think, and the father--a married man with whom Takiko had a brief, passionless affair--has no idea that she got pregnant. Her father beats her; her mother implores her to have the child aborted. But Takiko yearns to have her child. For her, the birth of her son, Akira, is an entrance into a world of independence and freedom, in which perhaps she can become a caretaker rather than a subordinate, driftless and subject to the whims of others. She has vivid dreams of herself on a field of ice, or running through the mountains (hence the title), and yet, in these images of isolation and movement the child is always with her.

What I liked best about Woman Running in the Mountains is the way that author Yuko Tsushima recognized the inherent drama in the everyday experiences of a mother. Takiko is carefully and specifically drawn, unique, and yet her experiences are not so different than those of other Japanese mothers, the kind she often comes into contact with at the maternity ward or the cooperative daycare. Tsushima avoids reproducing certain conservative ideas about the way motherhood ennobles a woman, or gives them purpose, or depicting Takiko as a reluctant mother who must learn to embrace the maternal nature of femininity. Instead, the novel does something quietly powerful in recognizing the possibilities that motherhood provide in fostering independence: it's becoming a mother that ultimately gives Takiko the strength to turn away from her cruel father and overbearing mother. 

As a single mother without employment, Takiko faces a number of obstacles, both practical and cultural. (Apparently, as the notes describe, it's very rare for a Japanese child to be born "illegitimate.") She struggles to find a childcare placement for Takiko; she struggles to find a job. The jobs she do find demand more of her time than she, as a new mother, can afford. Akira turns out to have been born with a hernia, an issue requiring a surgery she can scarcely afford. Tsushima solves Takiko's problems by providing her a job at a nursery whose greenhouses are high in the mountains where her dreams take place. And yet, this job comes with its own obstacles: she falls deeply in love with a gruff older gardener who cannot return her affections. And yet, in the nursery, Takiko herself flowers. It's a job she's pushed toward by her motherhood, a process, Tsushima suggests, by which she becomes more herself.