Confessions of Love

"Confession of Love" is chronicles the stormy vicissitudes of love like most of Chico Uno's others writings. It is based upon the sensational romantic career of the artist Togo Seiji, with whom Uno entered a five-year liaison just after Togo emerged alive from a highly publicized double suicide attempt. The narrator, named Yuasa Joji in the novel, is a familiar Japanese romantic hero, a weak man irresistible to women. Although Yuasa has a way with women, his charms are mixed with passivity. He whips his romances up to a crescendo but can take them no further and he shatters his own life as well as those of his lovers. This novel is a chronicle of the 1920s, when so-called "modern girls," known for their bobbed hair as well as their attempts to challenge old and repressive attitudes about a woman's place in society, flourished in Japan.