Ten years ago, the journal Bungei put together a special issue on my work, and Tsushima-san contributed a wonderful essay to it. She mentioned the shock she’d felt at Nakagami Kenji’s untimely passing, and later, when I told her how moved I’d been by the memorial essay she’d written for him back then, she said, “Well, Hoshino-san, when I die you can write one for me.” Touched, I gladly promised I would.

It was a promise I thought I wouldn’t have to fulfill for at least another few decades. But now here I am, sustaining the same shock Tsushima-san did back when Nakagami died. I’ve lost my bearings, no longer sure of where I am, or when.

Tsushima-san frequently wrote stories about characters who’d lost irreplaceable people in their lives, showing how they try to accept death, to overcome it and move on; Tsushima-san herself, though, always seemed as far from death as a person can be. In fact, life force overflowed from her to an almost excessive degree, pushing back death at every turn.

I was one of those fascinated by this life force of hers, pulled into her orbit by her magnetism. We first met during the 2002 Japan-India Writers' Caravan, a project conceived by and for writers who wanted to travel to India. Tsushima-san took charge of the project with her usual verve, co-running it with the Indian writer Mridula Garg, the idea being that it was strange that Japanese and Indian authors only knew of each others’ work via mediation by the West. To redress this, the Caravan was a traveling roadshow facilitating direct meetings between non-Western authors.

Preparing this project, Tsushima-san took it upon herself to read the work the Indian writers had published in English. So the trip involved, for her, not just the physical movement to India, but also the movement of her heart into an Indian linguistic space via the written word. I tried to imitate her effort the best I could, but my English was so poor that in the end I had to give it up. But it wasn’t necessarily that Tsushima-san’s English was so good〓rather, it was simply that she felt she needed to do it, so she didn’t let anything stop her. Imagining it now, it strikes me as so like her to work so deftly, even lightheartedly, to overcome any and all boundaries she may encounter.

The Caravan ended up making two trips to India, as well as hosting Indian writers in Japan and a making a trip to Taiwan. Everyone working at Subaru during those years as the journal backed each of the project’s endeavors must share the sense of loss I’m feeling now.

As the excitement around the Caravan died down, Tsushima-san decided to use the money left after the Women Writers' Association dissolved to fund the publication of books by Indian women authors in translation. The task of readying the translations for publication, our literary sensibilities rubbing up against each other all the while, was an intense experience for the four of us who made up the little production committee: Tsushima-san, myself, author Matsuura Rieko and office manager Fujii Hisako.

Tsushima-san’s desire to always move outward, to encounter those who were total strangers to her, was not merely an intellectual endeavor〓it seems to me to have been something more immediate that that, something rawer. And I think this is a quality we had in common. I aspired to be like her, envious of the way she balanced the enormous scale of her border-crossings with a personal touch, the way she treated everyone she met as just another person, no different from anyone with whom to share fellow-feeling. In this way, Tsushima-san was always there before me, guiding me.