These are stories that cut deeply, and remain etched into your memory long after the last page. Largely billed as a feminist writer, Tsushima evades any label, her fiction transcends gender to focus on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity.
— Kris Kosaka, The Japan Times
The eight powerful stories of The Shooting Gallery examine the lives of single women coping with motherhood, passion, jealousy, and the tug-of-war between responsibility and entrapment.
An unwed mother arranges for her children to meet their father, who is a stranger to them. A woman confronts the “other woman” in her lover’s life. A young single mother on an outing to the seaside comes face to face with how much she resents her own children. Another woman tries desperately to hold on to a private life despite her controlling male relatives.
These are stories that cut deeply, and remain etched into your memory long after the last page. Largely billed as a feminist writer, Tsushima evades any label, her fiction transcends gender to focus on the existential loneliness that is at the heart of humanity.
— Kris Kosaka, The Japan Times
As potent and heady as a dry martini….Tsushima is an archaeologist of the female psyche.
— Village Voice
[Tsushima’s heroines share a] hopeless, level gaze which sees everything, the ability (in spite of having seen everything) to go ahead, eyes on the road–it takes a very special and very personal talent to so convincingly display this….[And] here Tsushima has finally found something like perfection in this imperfect world–Geraldine Harcourt’s translations. After the first page, one completely forgets that it is, indeed, a translation one is reading.
— Donald Richie, The Japan Times
Tsushima is a subtle, surprising, elegant writer who courageously tells unexpected truths about an unfamiliar, yet recognizable world.
— Margaret Drabble
