The Japan Times called it "A novel at once powerfully uplifting and achingly sad" and lauded Geraldine Harcourt's "elegant translation". Abhrajyoti Chakraborty in
The New Yorker cautioned against reading Tsushima's works, including
Child of Fortune, through a strictly
biographical lens, stating that such an approach would be "to deny her narrators a selfhood independent of society, and to deny Tsushima the freedom, as a writer, not to be conflated with her protagonists." For
LitHub, Rónán Hession recommended the book in a list of books that excelled in empathetic writing. After Harcourt's death in 2019,
Newsroom wrote a tribute article on her behalf, stating that "Harcourt's translations seem to hold and carry the voices of the original, which strikes me as an unfathomable kind of magic" specifically with regard to
Child of Fortune and
Territory of Light. == References ==