THE STORY OF A SINGLE WOMAN, written in 1972 and still dividing opinion

THE STORY OF A SINGLE WOMAN
UNO CHIYO (tr. Rebecca Copeland)
Pushkin Press Classics (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$12.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A piercingly beautiful and candid novel of love, sex and independence in 1920s Japan by a trailblazing Japanese writer.

She left her home, just a girl, determined to live alone. But wasn’t this the very life her late father had most fervently forbidden?

As an older woman, Kazue looks back on her tumultuous younger years with piercing clarity. Growing up in a tiny Japanese mountain village at the start of the twentieth century, her life was shadowed by the demands and expectations of her troubled, alcoholic father. While she is still a young teenager, her family arranges for her to marry an older cousin; Kazue stays with the boy for only ten days before returning home alone.

This is the beginning of a life of questing independence, which will see Kazue forced to leave her home at eighteen following a love affair, going first to Korea and then to Tokyo. Driven by her impulses and an indomitable spirit of hope, Kazue moves from one relationship to another, hungry for experience. As her sense of identity and voice grows, she takes to writing as a means to live a life on her own terms.

Candidly told and full of stunning imagery, The Story of a Single Woman is an autobiographical novel by one of Japan’s most significant 20th-century writers, a trailblazer who lived and wrote like no-one else.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: A short work of autofiction, in Japanese called "watakushi-shōsetsu" which Translator Copeland helpfully renders as "I-novel"; very much like the French récit, with the subject one's self but lightly fictionalized. I like this form because it allows us to focus on the experience of the events without dilution by considering other PoVs.

That's also why it's short. It's easy to see that this technique could become overbearing, solipsistic, even unpleasantly claustrophobic, at any great length.

Considering the era...early twentieth century...when this character, Kazue, lived, and considering it's the life of Chiyo herself, this is a remarkably unconventional narrative. Kazue is married off, but decides that is not for her. She simply...leaves. There are women in 2025 who would not be able to muster that up in themselves; she did it over a hundred years ago. Left, never went back, never yoked herself to another man without her choice, just went about the task of living her own life with whatever company from whatever man she chose. Of course, this being a real life's events, there were men who used her; the unusually frank thing is there were men she discussed that she used, too.

I think a lot of readers are inclined to judge the resolute focus on herself, her inner world, unkindly where, for example, they would not judge Cheever or Updike (to name but two navel-gazing solipsistic men of celebrity) in that way. A woman writing so closely about herself, about how her behaviors feel to her and why she decided to do them, is still "transgressive" but it's another unquestioned privilege for men. Reviewers might tut over the man's unreflective gaze but no one would complain that he left no room in the story for others; feelings. He's a man. No one expects him to.

So here's Author Uno making that choice, and many are the assessments of that as a problem; but it's never formulated as taking a man's freedom or something direct like that. It's a quiet assumption that women must always write about, therefore consider and even center, the feelings of others in their lives as well as in their creative ways.

Interesting to me that privilege is not only pervasive but also invisible until you choose to see it. Judging Author Uno as not giving you what you were never promised in her story is, it seems to me, pretty clearly applying misogynist standards to her. Her life was less destructive to others than her own wastrel father's was, yet I know many judge her behavior in their reviews not dismiss that behavior as a product of her upbringing so to be smiled indulgently upon.

That feels essentially unfair to me. I'm pretty sure I'd've done it too until recently. The world has changed, and it took me with it.

But for all my appreciation of Kazue's candor, I was not convinced that this story should not have been a novel-novel instead of an I-novel. It wasn't always clear to me that we gained enough by that technique to make it worth losing the richness of a novel's scope for settings and emotional responses to events. I'm not quite, then, at all five stars, but no lower than four and a half because, even in the twenty-first century it feels radical to many readers for a woman to be so unapologetically focused on herself and her feelings.