Customer Reviews

Confessions of Love

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I bought this book based on the cover design of an earlier edition, which may be a doctored photo of the author. I fell in love with the woman in the picture. I found the book to be quite an illuminating portrait of a total wuss who is completely enslaved by the passion and power of Japanese womanhood. For a man not quite as much wuss as the central character, this could be a fate not worse than death. Uno Chiyo, herself a true femme fatale of the first rank, both as a character and as a person well documented both in Japanese literature and culture all the way back to the Heian Jidai, reveals a rather nasty, even perverse distaste for this foolish man. Certainly the author herself was expressing the glory of these immensely passionate people (the Japanese in general, both men and women) and contributing to expanding on the generally recognized steretype of Japan as a nation of bland conformists. Ain't so. Above all, don't believe the Japanese who would sell you on this idea. They, particularly the women, are tigers, not helpless pussy cats. Study the literature. Watch the stereotype dissolve.

This book was written by a fascinating woman named Uno Chiyo, who was unwilling to accept the life of a simple farm life. On numerous ocasions she left her multiple husbands to either go off with another man or pursue literary interests. This book is supposedly the reflections of one of her many men. An artist who had just recently formed a double suicide pact with the woman he loved. It is said that Uno shared the futon with the man that was blood stained by the man's dead lover. With this premise one would think that this book would be quite interesting, but in my humble opinion i found it to be quite boing in fact. Basically the reader gets the first hand ciew of the artist lusting after the several women he pursues while ignoring his wife and child. One can not really blame him for the cold treatment of his wife because she is quite cold and having amorous meetings on the sidew herself. What the reader gets is basically a description of the man's longing. The book does paint a good picture of bourgeois 30s Japan and the scene at the end is quite good.