Woman Running in the Mountains and the Body That Still Exists Outside Motherhood

Takiko Odaka is twenty-one, unmarried and pregnant, and she does not tell anybody who the father is.

Not her mother, who asks and keeps asking. Not her father, who would be dangerous with the information. Not the man himself, who she does not contact, does not ask for money, and does not inform. She had a brief involvement with him, it ended, she is carrying the consequence, and she has decided that the fact belongs to her.

Tsushima Yūko published this in 1980, and the refusal is the first thing the novel gives us. Before we know what Takiko wants, before we know what she is like, we know what she will not say.

This month’s theme in the atlas is love languages and misread needs, and the private sentence underneath it is: I want to be understood without having to turn misunderstanding into a test. In Japanese the first half of that is one word — 察してほしい, the wish to be perceived without having to explain oneself.

The companion piece to this one, on Drive My Car, watches a man take that wish and turn it into a marriage-shaped disaster. This novel does something harder to talk about, because Takiko’s silence does not look like a failure. It looks like dignity.

The society Takiko moves through has two ready-made categories for a woman in her position, and it applies them in sequence.

Before the birth she is the girl who got herself into trouble. The frame carries its own explanation — she was careless, or unlucky, or led astray — and its own prescription, which is that she should be ashamed and should be made respectable as quickly as possible, ideally by the man, and failing that by disappearing.

After the birth she is a mother. The frame is warmer and it is not more accurate. A mother is understood to be exhausted, devoted, and entirely oriented toward the child. Her interiority is assumed to have been converted into the infant’s wellbeing at something close to a one-to-one rate.

What is missing from both slots is the same thing, and it is the thing the novel’s title is about. Neither the fallen woman nor the mother is issued with a body that wants anything on its own account. The first has a body that erred and must now be governed. The second has a body that feeds, carries and does not sleep. Neither has a body that notices someone across a room, or wants to be touched for no reason that serves anybody else.

Takiko has one of those. The novel is quietly insistent on it, and that insistence is the most radical thing in the book.

It is worth assembling the withholdings, because a reader tends to register them one at a time and miss how consistent the pattern is.

She does not name the father. She does not tell him he has a son. She does not explain her decision to her mother in terms her mother could use. She does not describe her exhaustion to the people at work in a way that would let them accommodate it. She does not present herself to anybody as someone with a case to be made.

Some of this is protection, and the novel is clear about which parts. Her father is volatile and information would be a weapon in that house. The man is married to his own life and involving him would hand him standing over hers.

But not all of it reduces to strategy. There is a temperament here, and the book is interested in it. Takiko’s refusal to account for herself extends past the situations where accounting would cost her. She simply does not hand people the story, even when handing it over would be safe, and even when the person asking is someone who loves her and is frightened.

The result is that she is surrounded by people forming theories about her. And she is, in an entirely literal sense, misread — by her mother, by her colleagues, by the institutions. It is also true that she has arranged conditions under which reading her correctly would require an unusual effort that nobody is going to make.

The wish to be understood without explaining is ordinary and this novel shows a specific, harsher version of it.

When Takiko is a pregnant unmarried woman, the people around her are at least curious. They want to know. Their curiosity is intrusive and it is a form of attention, and attention can be converted into being known if the conditions are right.

After the birth, the curiosity stops. She becomes legible, and being legible is worse. Everybody now knows what she is: a young mother, tired, coping. There is no longer a question about her, so nobody asks one. Her needs are assumed to be the child’s needs — more sleep, more money, more help with the baby — and those assumptions are correct as far as they go, which is what makes them so effective at concealing everything else.

This is the mechanism worth taking away from the novel. A person can be surrounded by accurate information about herself and still be entirely unmet, because the accurate information fills the space where a question would have gone. The mother who is offered practical help all day, and who cannot say the thing she actually wants, is not being neglected. She is being read correctly at the wrong resolution.

And 察してほしい has no traction in that situation. There is nothing to perceive, because everyone has already finished perceiving. The wish to be understood without speaking requires somebody who is still looking.

The title image recurs throughout and it is easy to file as a general metaphor for freedom. It is more specific than that.

Takiko sees mountains from the city — glimpsed between buildings, imagined, remembered, appearing at the edge of a tiring day. What she pictures is not escape in the abstract, not a different life, not the absence of her son. She pictures moving. Running, climbing, green, air, a body going uphill under its own power for no purpose except that it can.

Notice what that fantasy leaves out. There is no man in it. There is no rescue, no romance, no relief from the child. It is not a wish to be elsewhere; it is a wish to be physically alive in a way that her days no longer contain.

This is the novel being precise about something that gets blurred constantly. A tired mother’s longing is routinely interpreted as unhappiness with her circumstances, and therefore as a threat to the child or to the marriage, and therefore as something to be reassured away. Takiko’s longing is nothing of the kind. She has a body that used to be able to move and now mostly carries things, and it misses itself.

A woman can love her child completely and want her body back. Those are not in tension, and treating them as though they were is how a great deal of ordinary wanting gets pathologised.

The novel keeps Takiko’s attention on other people’s bodies throughout, and does so without apology or explanation.

She notices men. She registers attraction. She is aware of being looked at and of wanting to be. She has a body that responds, and none of this is framed as a lapse, a symptom, or evidence that she is not taking motherhood seriously.

It is hard to overstate how unusual this was, and to a degree still is. The cultural convention — not only Japanese — is that a mother’s sexuality either disappears or becomes a problem. It may be permitted inside a marriage as maintenance. It may appear as scandal. What it is almost never allowed to be is ordinary, continuous and unremarkable: a woman who had a child and is still a person who wants things.

Tsushima simply writes it as continuous. There is no scene in which Takiko rediscovers her desire, because it never went anywhere. The novel treats this as too obvious to dramatise, which is a stronger statement than dramatising it would have been.

And it connects back to the month’s theme with some force. If a woman’s continuing desire is not an available category, then a woman who feels it has no way to state it that will be heard as information rather than as confession. She is left wanting something she cannot name to anybody, which is the precondition for every misread need in this Library.

Takiko takes work at a plant nursery and meets Kambayashi, a man with a child of his own who has a disability. Something exists between them. It is attentive, it is mutual, and it is real.

A more obliging novel would resolve here. Two people carrying difficult circumstances recognise each other, and the recognition becomes a partnership, and the partnership retroactively explains the hardship as the thing that led her to him.

Tsushima declines. The connection stays a connection. It is not converted into a solution, it does not fix her housing or her exhaustion or her standing, and the novel ends without handing the reader the resolution the shape of the story has been promising.

That refusal is a kindness, though it does not feel like one. A book that married Takiko off would have said that a woman in her position is a problem awaiting a man, and that her interest in Kambayashi was really a need for rescue wearing the costume of attraction. By leaving it unresolved, the novel insists that her attraction to him was just attraction — a thing she was entitled to have, that did not need to be justified by leading anywhere.

Most wanting in an adult life does not lead anywhere. It is still real while it is happening, and a life in which only the instrumental wants are permitted to exist is a narrower life than it looks from outside.

Everything so far has been on Takiko’s side, and the novel is better than that, so this section is the one the piece exists for.

She is not only being misread. She is also, deliberately and consistently, making herself unreadable — and the two are not the same thing, however much they look alike from inside.

Consider her mother, who is the most-wronged person in the book and is almost never counted as wronged. She asks, repeatedly and with fear, because her daughter is twenty-one and pregnant and she cannot help without knowing anything. Takiko gives her nothing. The mother is then left to construct a version of events from silence, and the version she constructs is wrong, and the wrongness is treated by the narrative as her failure of understanding. Some of it is. Some of it is the predictable consequence of being handed no information by someone she is trying to love.

And here is the uncomfortable part, which the novel is honest enough to leave standing: Takiko’s opacity works. It keeps her free of a story that would have swallowed her. Had she named the father, the machinery would have started — the family meetings, the negotiations, the pressure toward a marriage that would have ended badly, the permanent status of a woman who was done a wrong. By saying nothing she stays the author of her own situation.

It costs her being known. Those are both true, and the novel does not adjudicate, and neither will this essay. What it will say is that opacity is a real strategy with a real price, and that a person paying it should at least know what she is buying.

The companion piece in this month watches a man decline to raise something with his wife and calls that second silence avoidance wearing the clothes of restraint. It would be neat to apply the same verdict here, and it would be wrong.

The difference is who pays. Kafuku’s silence is spent on somebody else’s account: his wife dies never having been told what he knew, never having been given the chance to be met in the thing she was actually doing. His restraint protected him and it cost her the conversation.

Takiko’s silence is spent mostly on her own. She forgoes support, comfort, and the possibility of being understood — and the person who goes without is largely her. The mother is genuinely injured by it, which the previous section insists on, and even so the balance of the cost is not the same.

There is also a difference in what the silence is protecting against. Kafuku has nothing to fear from speaking except discomfort and the loss of a story he prefers. Takiko is a young unmarried woman in 1980 whose circumstances, if fully disclosed, would have been taken out of her hands. Silence is a poor instrument, and it was one of the few available to her.

So the pair does not resolve into a rule. What it produces is a better question than either film or novel would produce alone: not whether to speak, but whose life your silence is being paid out of. That question has an answer in most real situations, and it is usually possible to work out before the fact rather than after.

A substantial part of the novel is procedural, and it is easy to read past because it is undramatic. Takiko arranges childcare, loses jobs, finds jobs, negotiates hours, calculates money, and moves through offices staffed by people applying rules.

None of these encounters are villainous. The novel is not interested in cruelty; it is interested in the ordinary friction of being a category to an institution. Forms have boxes. The boxes were designed around an assumed shape of family, and Takiko is not that shape, so every interaction requires her to be explained as an exception.

This has a consequence for the month’s theme that is worth naming. A person who must constantly explain her circumstances to officials in order to obtain basic things will develop a relationship with self-explanation that has nothing to do with intimacy. Explaining becomes a transaction with someone who has power over the outcome — something you do to be processed, in the minimum sufficient words.

It is not hard to see how a woman doing that all week might arrive in her private life with no appetite whatsoever for explaining herself to anybody, including to people who only want to know her. The wish to be understood without speaking is not always temperament. Sometimes it is what is left after speaking has been used up.

The novel is described in outline. 『山を走る女』 was published in 1980 and the English text most readers will encounter is Geraldine Harcourt’s translation; edition, pagination and availability are to be confirmed at the publication gate, and readings drawn from a translation carry the translator’s decisions inside them in ways this essay does not separate out.

Tsushima Yūko wrote repeatedly about single mothers and was herself a single parent after divorce. The essay does not read the novel as autobiography and no claim here rests on her biography; where the two are mentioned together it is context, not evidence.

The characterisation of the two social categories available to Takiko — the fallen woman and the mother — describes attitudes of the period as the novel presents them and as they are generally understood. It is a characterisation rather than a measured account of what people in 1980 believed, and attitudes were neither uniform nor unchanging.

The reading of the mountains as a bodily rather than a general image is this essay’s interpretation. The novel supplies the image repeatedly and does not gloss it, and a reader may reasonably take it as a broader figure for escape.

The claim that being read correctly at the wrong resolution is a distinct failure from being neglected is this Library’s framing, not the novel’s. It is offered because it names something readers recognise, not because it is established anywhere.

And the comparison with the Drive My Car essay is a comparison between two works about one theme, made by this Library. Neither the film nor the novel is in conversation with the other, and neither author proposed the distinction this month has been built around.

The question the novel leaves is not whether Takiko should have spoken.

It is the one underneath the section about the institutions. If you have spent the week explaining your circumstances to people who needed the explanation in order to process you, how much appetite is left for explaining yourself to someone who only wants to know you? And if the answer is none, what happens to the wanting that never gets stated — not the practical wants, which are visible and get handled, but the ones that have no box on any form?

For a great many women those wants have simply gone quiet, and quiet gets mistaken for absent, including by the person they belong to.

This Library can offer one thing here, and it is language: a way of naming a want that does not require the want to be a problem first, so that it stops being a weather inside you and becomes something sayable.

The other thing is smaller. An evening in which somebody is paying attention, the terms set in advance and by you, where saying what you want is the activity rather than the risk, and where nothing is concluded about you from your silence. Not a resolution, not a rescue, and not a treatment for anything. A few hours in which the body that exists outside the role is the one in the room.