The Story of a Single Woman is a thoughtful and poetic autobiographical novel about a woman who follows her impulses and inadvertently lives what was, in her age, a highly unconventional life. While it can be read as a study of a woman’s experience coming of age in prewar Japan, the directness and simplicity of the prose universalizes this fictionalized retelling of Uno’s early life so that it transcends constraints of time and place. It’s effectively imbued with both the intimacy of a letter to her past self, and the shrewd wisdom borne of the detachment created by age. This nuanced depiction of a fearless young woman on a quest for self discovery is well-deserving of its distinction as a classic piece of autobiographical fiction.
“If others do to her what she has done to someone else, she does not hate them for it. After all, Kazue was never conscious of what she was doing. She simply took what life had to offer, with no more resistance than if she were being buffeted along by the wind” (141).
