Kōji Uno

Who was Kōji Uno?

Kōji Uno was a noted Japanese novelist and short story writer.

Uno was born in Fukuoka to parents of Samurai origin. His grandfather was a police captain and his father a teacher. After his father's death when Uno was four, his family lost all their savings speculating in the stock market. When Uno was eight, he was sent to live with his grandmother and an uncle in Sōemonchō as his mother became a waitress. There he lived, beside the Dōtonbori entertainment district, among geisha, prostitutes, wig-makers, and gamblers, as he attended Rikugun elementary school from 1899-1901. He attended Tennōji middle school, where he learned to read English and acquired a taste for Nikolai Gogol's fiction. In 1910 he moved to Tokyo to study English literature at Waseda University, where he read Symbolist poetry and Russian modernists including Leonid Andreyev, Mikhail Artsybashev, Konstantin Balmont, Aleksandr Kuprin, Fyodor Sologub, and Boris Konstantinovich Zaytsev.

At age 28, Uno published his first major work, "In the Storehouse", whose colloquial and ironic style was criticized as "flippant" and "popular". After seven years of mental illness and silence, 1927-1933, his publications became more conventional and Uno participated in the literary life of the day. During World War II he wrote essays on literary life in the Taishō period.