A piercingly beautiful and candid novel of love, sex and independence in 1920s Japan by a trailblazing Japanese writer

She left her home, just a girl, determined to live alone. But wasn’t this the very life her late father had most fervently forbidden?

As an older woman, Kazue looks back on her tumultuous younger years with piercing clarity. Growing up in a tiny Japanese mountain village at the start of the 20th century, her life was shadowed by the demands and expectations of her troubled, alcoholic father. When her family arrange for her to marry a cousin when she is still a young teenager, Kazue stays with the boy for only 10 days before returning home alone.

This is the beginning of a life of striking independence, one which will see Kazue forced to leave her home at eighteen following a love affair and that will take her first to Korea and then to Tokyo. Driven by her impulses and an indomitable spirit of hope, Kazue moves from one relationship to another, hungry for experience. Ultimately, she takes to writing as a means to live a life on her own terms.

Candidly told and full of stunning imagery, The Story of a Single Woman is an autobiographical novel by one of Japan’s most significant 20th-century writers, a trailblazer who lived and wrote like no-one else.

Translated by Rebecca Copeland