Confessions of Love

This pacy novel, published in 1935, is set in central Japan and describes the modernising society of the 1920s in which young progressive women sought to break with tradition. The narrator and central character, Yuasa Joji, is a young artist in a broken marriage and he tells about his several affairs with young women. The novel draws heavily on the actual experience of Togo Seiji. The author had contacted Togo (his surname) as part of her research for another novel, seeking to give an accurate representation of a gas-inhalation suicide, and they ended up spending the following five years together. It took him a year to tell her all his reminiscences of his several romances.

The author, Uno Chiyo (born 28 November 1897), had a traditional, restrictive upbringing in provincial society in southwestern Japan. Her father died in 1913 and she moved to Tokyo in 1917 and worked for a short time in a restaurant frequented by writers. She married soon after moving to the city and went to live in Sapporo. Having won a newspaper competition for short stories, Uno (her surname) moved back to Tokyo, abandoning her marriage, to pursue a literary career. Her most highly regarded work, the novella, Ohan, was published in 1957 and won the Noma Literary Prize for the most outstanding work published that year in Japan.

The artist, Joji (his forename), goes to great lengths to pursue his romantic interests. In one scene, he travels to a remote mountain estate during a severe storm in an attempt to rescue his beloved Tsuyuko from captivity in her grandparents’ home. In order to get there, he pays a driver to take him there from the railway station. The driver is fatally injured in an avalanche when making his return journey. Joji  considers his responsibility for the accident:
“Was this man going to die? Was he going to die like a poor dog, helpless in this strange house where they couldn't even get a doctor? Because he had driven me? The men stopped trying to help him further and an eerie silence ensued while we waited the few moments until he died.”