Uno Koji - Literature of Love and Madness about Women 1891-1961

Uno Koji - Literature of Love and Madness about Women 1891-1961

Koji Uno was born in Fukuoka City in 1891. His father died early in life and his mother took him from place to place during his childhood, leading to an unstable life and a strong dependence on her, which deeply affected his later works. He said, "Women are demons," and tried to find the essence of human nature in love, madness, obsession, and destruction. The Taisho period (1912-1926) was a period of prosperity for naturalistic literature, and as urbanization progressed, love and sex began to become the subject of literature. Uno was unique in her portrayal of women not as mere symbols of beauty or comfort, but as beings that bring ruin.

His masterpiece "Inside the Storehouse" (1925), a controversial work about abnormal psychology and sexual perversion, was controversial at the time of its publication. The story is set in a closed warehouse, and the method used to reveal the depths of the human psyche was shocking to the literary world of the time. In "Ikegawa" (River of Thoughts), the tragic nature of human nature is brought into sharp relief through the entanglement of male and female lust, and it occupies a unique position among prewar literature.

Compared with his contemporaries, Junichiro Tanizaki pursued "beauty and aestheticism" and Yasunari Kawabata depicted "delicate emotions," while Uno faced the world of lust and madness in a more graphic manner. Uno's views on women, while sometimes cruel, have the power to reveal the true nature of human existence and have left a consistent imprint on the "dark side of life" in literature from the prewar to the postwar period.

Even during the early Showa period, when modernism and the new sensibility were at the height of their popularity, Uno's works continued to depict the depths of human nature through love-hate dramas about women, without pandering to the fashions of the times. Uno's stance showed how literature is an activity that questions the roots of human nature in a society tossed about at the speed of modernization.