• Decadence.Japanese factions

In 1929, the writer of short novels, kimonos designer and editor of her own magazine, Stylus , Chiyo Uno (1897-1996) went to interview the painter Seiji Togo, a famous Japanese painter. One was interested in a love story with an unhappy ending in which the painter and his lover had attempted suicide. Togo survived, but the girl did not . One went to meet him and listen to the story from the protagonist's mouth. They lay down on the same sofa on which the lovers had committed suicide, One said it was still stained with blood. Togo and Uno lived together for five years. Chiyo Uno published the novel inspired by that story, Confessions of love , for deliveries in the literary magazine Chuo Koron between 1933 and 1935. The set, in original, did not exceed 150 pages. That first encounter and that irresistible attraction, of which six decades later One said "we fell on top of each other like animals", does not appear in Confessions of love , translated into Spanish in 1992 and then published in Random House Literature and now recovered by Alpha Decay .

Joji Yuasa is Seiji Togo's transcript, and tells his love stories with young girls, after a first introductory phrase: "I don't know where to start, he said, and after reflecting for a moment, he began to tell the story slowly." What comes next is the first-person account of their encounters, rather ephemeral crushes and infatuations of young people . Yuasa, like Togo, is a painter. He has spent a lot of time abroad, he returns to Japan, where he left a wife and son. His family is broken, the link was undone long ago. With the divorce pending, but blocked for various reasons - among them the most powerful and paralyzing, the lack of money - will be chaining adventures of diverse depth and nature. None of the girls are over 21 years old . The first, Komaki, sends him letters daily to quote him with the punctuality of a Swiss watch. He, seduced perhaps by his own vanity, comes. A few days later, she will take you to a hotel. She's decision likes: “What you are doing,” he says, “is what men do. I'm supposed to do it. Once she got rid of the kimono, “her body, free of any garment, was unusually sensual. Looking at her dressed, it would have been impossible to even dream it, but the softness of her white skin made me feel that, if I touched her, my hand would stick to her skin , never being able to push her away. Probably, she was aware of it. And perhaps he knew that he could captivate the heart of any man who saw her naked. The encounter is more violent than sexual, instead of kisses there are bites, scratches and struggles between them: «Suddenly he dropped his head back and closed his eyes. Looking at her, I saw a trickle of blood sliding down the corners of her pale lips .

Then, Tsuyuko, "of a living beauty similar to a flower that has just bloomed," Komaki's friend, will be the only thing that matters to the painter. He will follow her wherever she goes, despite family opposition, despite not having resolved her divorce yet, despite never having consummated that love. Tsuyuko's family has other plans for her: to marry her. The lovers will try to escape twice . The narrator and protagonist will try to recover from Tsuyuko's absence by entangling with another young woman, Tomoko, whose illness, tuberculosis, will accelerate a marriage in which the two enter without too much desire and with false expectations.

Confessions of love is a romantic comedy with a face of tragedy. Sometimes he remembers the weavings of the dangerous friendships , sometimes the shakespearian entanglement comedies, with their deceptions and confusions. Sometimes, he suggests a crime trial : as in Buñuel's movie, here the things that happen happen more in the head of the protagonist and narrator than in truth. But it is mostly an action novel : things are happening all the time, the characters travel from one city to another in Japan, they go from station to station, they go by train or boat, and they move constantly as if they were all the time chasing something, maybe love, maybe satisfaction. The movement of the characters is a reflection of the protagonist's love volatility, whose affections and passions change easily and without any drama: from love taken away from indifference , from a feeling of helplessness to a comfortable stability, from there, to existential void. He justifies his capricious soul by the absence of family, but he has not been able to keep his family together.

Buried in love affairs is that story: «Then the child was born. It was beautiful. He was so handsome that when he looked at the smiling face of the little boy wrapped in the white hood, I had thought that for him I would not have cared to work all my life without separating myself from my aluminum lunch box. I felt a great joy of living ». But that unconditional love will not remain in the distance: “However, upon my return to Japan, Matsuyo and my son had changed so much that they seemed to have become two different people . The boy in the white hood had already turned nine and was looking at me suspiciously sucking cheap candy. [...] Perhaps they had no choice but to change in that way while awaiting my return. I don't know how many times I reflected on it. But at some point he had stopped loving them.

And so, little by little, the novel is abandoning the path of love adventures, furtive kisses, abandonments and jealousy to enter a slightly darker and stormy path : that of the unshaven lovers who commit suicide, that of the lack of money, that of despair, that arrives without warning and without making noise, but when it appears, it is already fully installed. When reviewing the novel, once the end is discovered, it is possible to recover the clues left throughout the story: the blood appears from the beginning, the violence is linked to love or at least to passion, and there is even the description of the scenario of a friend's suicide ("the blood splatters, which seemed to have been scattered with a sprayer, had reached a distance that I never thought was possible; it was a terribly macabre scene"). That is, in a subtle way and without leaving a trace, the elements for the love tragedy were served. Chiyo Uno's expertise lies not only in their disposition, but also in the management of narrative tension and plots and in the ability to combine the development of the action with the images in which time seems to stop .

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