Review: "The Story of a Single Woman" by Uno Chiyo

The Story of a Single Woman by Uno Chiyo, translated by Rebecca Copeland
English translation published April 2025 via Pushkin Press Classics
★★★

Most of Uno Chiyo's works, writes Rebecca Copeland, who translated this one, [...] fall under the category of watakushi-shōsetsu or 'I-novel', a distinctly Japanese form that is not fiction but not strictly autobiography either. (loc. 30*) And this is just that: a fictionalized version of Uno's life through the age of 30 or so, taking her from country to city and job to job and lover to lover. It's told from a looking-back perspective (Uno's self-insert, Kazue, reflecting on her youth from the perspective of her seventies) and thus carries some distance.

It's so clear that Uno just wasn't all that interested in conventionality. Here, Kazue is married off to a cousin at the age of thirteen (it was the early 1900s); the marriage goes nowhere, so Kazue quietly goes home and never returns to her once-upon-a-husband, and nobody really presses her on it. Later, she takes jobs as they come to her and works hard at them without any real passion; she drifts from lover to lover with no intent of marrying again and a cheerful disregard for the knowledge that such informal affairs are (again, it was the early 1900s) societally taboo.

This was something of an oddity of a book. I don't think I've read anything else in the watakushi-shōsetsu category, though of course I've read plenty of Western autobiographical fiction. It's hard for me to know how much of the things where I wanted more (more connection between Kazue and the reader, more details about her daily life, less floating through months or years in just a few sentences) are a function of me reacting to this particular book and how much they're a function of me not understanding the specific genre very well. The second half in particular focuses quite heavily on...not romance, not really, but various men in whose beds Kazue finds herself, sometimes with passion and sometimes because they were there and sometimes because they've taken advantage of her. On the one hand I really love the neutrality with which Uno presents Kazue (she's treated neither as hypersexual nor someone to be shamed, simply as someone who is comfortable with her desires), but on the other hand I wished for a bit less "and then she slept with this guy and then she slept with that guy".

The book ends rather abruptly (in a way that, oddly, reminds me of The Four Corners of the Heart), and I'll have to have a look to see whether there is (or was intended to be) a follow-up covering later parts of Kazue's life.

Even if you don't read the book (which I definitely recommend to lovers of literary oddities), it's worth having a read through Copeland's blog series about meeting Uno in the 80s.

*Quotes are from an ARC and may not be final.

Thanks to the author and publisher for providing a review copy through NetGalley.