Kōji Uno

Biography

Kōji Uno (宇野 浩二) was born on July 26, 1891, in Fukuoka, Japan, into a family with a samurai background. His grandfather was a police captain, and his father was a teacher. When Uno was just four, his father passed away, leading to a series of challenges for the family. They lost their financial resources through stock market speculation. By the time Uno was eight, he was sent to live with his grandmother and an uncle in Sōemonchō, near the Dōtonbori entertainment district of Osaka. Growing up around geisha, prostitutes, wig-makers, and gamblers, he attended Rikugun elementary school from 1899 to 1901. This environment deeply influenced his sensibility and later writing.

Uno went to Tennōji middle school, where he became skilled at reading English and discovered the works of Nikolai Gogol. He was drawn to Gogol's ironic and absurdist styles. In 1910, he moved to Tokyo to study English literature at Waseda University. There, he engaged with Symbolist poetry and Russian modernist writers who were popular at the time, such as Leonid Andreyev, Mikhail Artsybashev, Konstantin Balmont, Aleksandr Kuprin, Fyodor Sologub, and Boris Konstantinovich Zaytsev. These writers greatly influenced his future style in Japanese prose.

At 28, Uno published his first major work, 'In the Storehouse.' Its colloquial, ironic style was criticized by some as being 'frivolous' and 'popular,' but it also established him as a unique voice in Japanese fiction. Starting in 1927, Uno suffered from a long period of mental illness that halted his publishing for seven years, until 1933. When he resumed writing, his style became more conventional, and he became more involved in the literary community of that time.

During World War II, Uno focused on essays about literary culture during the Taishō era (1912–1926), providing historical insights into modern Japanese literature. After the war, he received the Yomiuri Prize in 1950 for his 1948 novel Omoigawa (思ひ川, River of Thought). His 1951 critical biography of the well-known author Ryūnosuke Akutagawa was also highly praised. In 1953, Uno supported twenty Communist factory workers accused of sabotaging a Japan National Railways freight train, writing two novels in their defense. In 1956, he visited China at the invitation of Premier Zhou Enlai. Uno passed away on September 21, 1961, due to pulmonary tuberculosis.