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Uno Chiyo (author), Rebecca Copeland (translator), The Story of a Single Woman, Pushkin Press, 2025. 106 pgs.

Everything in Uno Chiyo’s The Story of a Single Woman, translated from the Japanese by Rebecca Copeland, revolves around memory, identity, desire and social expectation. It resembles a traditional Japanese tale, yet it deals with universal themes such as self-discovery, feminine identity and the yearning for success. From the very beginning, one feels as though one is looking back in time. The narrative begins: “Kazue was born in this house some seventy years ago. She never knew her mother’s face—the mother who had given birth to her. But when she was a young girl the local folk would gather round her whenever she walked through town and say: ‘Why, Miss Kazue, you’re the living image of your okaka!’” Later in life, Uno’s narrative unfolds, but it is also evident that she refused to allow society to define her. Much of the emotion lies in what is unspoken: the secrets, the omissions and the silences. Kazue does not know what her mother looked like. All she can remember of her father are fragments. It is as much what is absent as what is present that shapes who she is.

Because Uno emphasises confession and fidelity to the self, the tale is firmly rooted in the I-novel tradition (watakushi-shōsetsu). The self is always seeking to understand where it fits within the world. Although it was first published in 1972, this novel offers a slightly antiquated interpretation of that idea. The narrative alternates between Kazue’s childhood and her later years, for she is a woman recalling her past. In a calm and unhurried tone, she opens herself and shares her secrets, much as in the I-novels. Kazue does not become sentimental or overwrought about it. She remains composed, as someone accustomed to keeping secrets and holding on to memories, even when she explains losing or destroying something.

The conflict between personal belief and social expectation is revealed through Kazue’s recollections of Takamori. “Whenever Kazue chances to recall Takamori, she is always struck by how odd it was to have such a pretty row of houses tucked away so deep in the mountains. There was little more than a street of houses, but Kazue frequently told herself that the only reason they existed was because her father’s house was there amongst them. Was this a delusion brought on by her belief that her father’s kinsmen were special?” These reflections do more than simply set the scene; they illustrate how we are perpetually caught between our own perceptions of ourselves and those imposed by others. The moment when the shopkeeper pretends to assist her, flaunting her father’s status, and “moved with an arrogant flourish, almost sneering: ‘Yes, I suppose I might sell to you’”, exposes how fragile identity truly is. It collapses the instant social standing is removed. Each day Kazue thinks of her father in small ways: “Her first distinct memories were of horses’ hoof-beats, day in and day out… she came across sheet after sheet of gift announcements, the sort presented to racehorse owners.” Although she bears the family name, his daughter must face the reality that those dreams were not genuine.

The notion of grappling with familial inheritance is a familiar one in Japanese literature. In The Thirteenth Night by Higuchi Ichiyō, the protagonist is a woman trapped in a marriage, bound by her family’s expectations rather than her own desires. A Late Chrysanthemum (1948) by Fumiko Hayashi portrays elderly women confronting their regrets and former loves in a society that fails to value their pain. These women, like Kazue in Uno Chiyo’s novel, cannot separate their lives from what society demands of them. Yet she possesses a quietly rebellious spirit. When her aunt advises her, “Taking a bride, they call it, my child—but it’s only a formality. You’ll face trying times, believe me, but you must bear up,” it seems that Kazue has little choice. However, she leaves and travels to Kawanishi, overcoming obstacles both real and imagined. In her inability to remain fixed on one path, she resembles not only Ichiyō’s heroines but also women from literature across the world, such as Anna in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878), Janie in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), and Nora in Ibsen’s A Doll’s House (1879).

Uno excels at portraying such acts of escape as far from ideal. She does not present Kazue’s decisions, relationships or affairs as exceptional. Rather, she reveals the uncertainties, the questions and the parts of ourselves that remain unknown even to us. “She had done what she had done, and the outcome was to be expected. Kata, kata. Her wooden sandals rang out under the night sky. Yes, she was trembling after all.” There is no triumph here, no simple tale of liberation. What gives Uno’s novel its candour and Kazue her depth is precisely that trembling. It expresses longing in fragments: a house with travelling singers, a shawl left behind one night, a moment of doubt with Nozaki after their circumstances have changed. Uno portrays Kazue’s romantic life without excess or scandal, yet without shame.

Uno distinguishes herself from other writers of the day through her restraint. While Tayama Katai and other early I-novelists believed it beneficial to be open and brutally honest, Uno tells a story that withholds as much as it reveals. “Years later Kazue could not help questioning just exactly what her feelings had been at the time. If only she had been conscious of what she was doing.” Memory is presented as something that cannot be trusted, something fragmented and full of flaws. For this reason, Uno resembles modern writers such as Virginia Woolf in To the Lighthouse or Proust in In Search of Lost Time, who explored the complex subject of memory and its power to shape identity.

Uno writes as a Japanese woman born in the early 1900s, living in a rule-bound society: “All the old taboos were forgotten. And yet the house was not the same as one that had never known taboos. Whenever Kazue did something, she could not help reminding herself: ‘This used to be forbidden.’” Perhaps Uno’s most perceptive observation on how social norms persist in our lives is that we may be free, yet remain haunted by the past.

Kazue also inhabits a specific moment and place. The audience at the sake shop, the bridge, the travelling singers and the kites fluttering overhead all evoke the rural Japanese landscape. Her visits to Korea and Tokyo reveal a nation in transition. A woman with lovers, she is also a writer and a teacher. Gossip and scandal surround her. As a writer in the 1920s, Uno followed her ambitions and lived on her own terms. These transformations mirror her own life. Yet The Story of a Single Woman is not about youthful rebellion. Its purpose is to reflect after the turmoil has quietened, allowing her to make sense of moments when she scarcely knew what she was doing and to find clarity through reflection.

Sylvia Plath’s Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar (1963), Doris Lessing’s Anna in The Golden Notebook (1962), Virginia Woolf’s Lily Briscoe in To the Lighthouse (1927), Jean Rhys’s Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Toni Morrison’s Sula Peace in Sula (1973), Nella Larsen’s Helga Crane in Quicksand (1928), Kate Chopin’s Edna Pontellier in The Awakening (1899), Mieko Kawakami’s Natsuko in Breasts and Eggs (2008; Eng. trans. 2020), and Colette’s heroines, women who refused to let society determine their desires or identities, all echo Kazue’s voice. Like Kazue, they often feel lonely and misunderstood, and they often stay quiet about it. Still, their resistance is gentle, brave, and persistent, turning loneliness into a fragile kind of liberation.

The list of names “Shigino, Kawagoe, Fujiu, Tabuse, Marifu, Mishō … Kazue, letter in hand, made a circuit of all the villages in the area” illustrates both her connection to and her distance from her community. Each name reminds the reader of her roots and ancestry, yet also of the tightly woven society she must leave behind to be herself.

Every work of fiction contains the tension between staying and leaving. When Kazue falters, one hears echoes of Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus running away, Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway walking through London to confront her past, and Hurston’s Janie traversing the streets in search of her voice. Uno’s brilliance lies in writing this search from the perspective of an older woman rather than a younger one, and in situating it within a rural Japanese world shaped by codes, silences, secret rooms and family honour.

At times, the prose borders on poetry, as in “It is a beautiful day. I can see so many kites fluttering over the field behind my house,” or when Morito says, “Tomorrow I’m going to fly my kite. I asked the owner of the saké goods shop to make me one. I’m going up to Mt Odaishi to fly it. Long live the Emperor! Banzai!” Although never explicitly articulated, these moments link the private and the public, the political and the personal. The Emperor’s name and the rituals of loyalty appear as emotions rather than as ideas, flashes of the past that continue to shape people’s lives. Kazue is deeply moved when she sees her mother weeping with joy: “Even when she saw how her mother’s eyes filled with tears, Kazue was unaware of her family’s poverty. All she knew was that for the first time in her life she had made her mother happy.” One of the most striking aspects of the novel is the contrast between belonging to a family and belonging to a nation, between shouting slogans and witnessing tears.

Despite its meticulous attention to detail, Uno’s prose is powerful in its intimacy. Small gestures such as Kazue snatching a shawl, slipping through a hedge or pausing in the dark to check a light before running again carry profound meaning. They reveal the novel’s central concern, the oscillation between virtue and conformity, between family and individuality, between prohibition and desire. The shawl becomes a burden, a symbol, a veil of shame and a marker of identity.

The Story of a Single Woman is about reckoning with the past, remembering and confessing without remorse. It belongs to the tradition of women’s tales and I-novels in Japan, as well as to the global canon of works depicting women who struggle against their families, communities and nations. What makes Uno Chiyo exceptional is her refusal to indulge in sentimentality or to seek pity. Kazue remembers, reflects, trembles and endures. Her strength lies in her awareness of both what she has done and what she could not do.

In a world filled with grand, dramatic narratives, Uno Chiyo’s novel reminds us that the quiet life of a woman who defies convention and seeks to live authentically is enough. It reveals how politics infiltrates private life, how forbidden things shape memory, and how the myths of modernism and feminism achieve their greatest power when grounded in truth. Although Kazue may have only a faint image of her mother and of her own actions, she joins the extraordinary company of fictional women who have had the courage to portray life as it truly is, flawed, fearful, defiant and unforgettable, through the fragments of memory she leaves behind.

How to cite: Wani, Nazir. “The Trembling of Memory: Self and Society in Uno Chiyo’s The Story of a Single Woman.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Oct. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/10/18/single-woman.

A postgraduate Gold Medallist in English Literature from the University of Kashmir, Wani Nazir, hailing from Pulwama, J&K, India, is an alumnus of the University of Kashmir, Srinagar. He is the author of the poetry collections …and the Silence Whispered and The Chill in the Bones. Presently working as a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Education, J&K, he writes both prose and poetry in English, Urdu, and his mother tongue, Kashmiri. A voracious and eclectic reader as well as a reviewer, he contributes his creative works, his “brain-children”, to Kashur Qalam, The Significant League, Muse India, Setu (a bilingual e-journal published from Pittsburgh, USA), Langlit and Literary Herald, Café Dissensus, Learning and Creativity, and The Dialogue Times, a journal published in London. He has received much acclaim for the beauty and depth of his writing. [All contributions by Wani Nazir.]

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