Koji Uno was a noted Japanese novelist and short story writer.
Background
Koji Uno was born on July 26, 1891 Fukuoka, Japan to parents of Samurai origin. His grandfather was a police captain and his father a teacher. After his father's death when Uno was four, his family lost all their savings speculating in the stock market. When Uno was eight, he was sent to live with his grandmother and an uncle in Sōemonchō as his mother became a waitress.
Education
Koji Uno lived beside the Dōtonbori entertainment district, among geisha, prostitutes, wig-makers, and gamblers, as he attended Rikugun elementary school from 1899-1901. He attended Tennoji middle school, where he learned to read English and acquired a taste for Nikolai Gogol's fiction. In 1910 Koji Uno moved to Tokyo to study English literature at Waseda University, where he read Symbolist poetry and Russian modernists including Leonid Andreyev, Mikhail Artsybashev, Konstantin Balmont, Aleksandr Kuprin, Fyodor Sologub, and Boris Konstantinovich Zaytsev. In 1911 he left Waseda University without graduating.
Career
At age 28, Uno published his first major work, "In the Storehouse", whose colloquial and ironic style was criticized as "flippant" and "popular". After seven years (1927-1933) of mental illness and silence, his publications became more conventional and Uno participated in the literary life of the day.
During World War II Koji Uno wrote essays on literary life in the Taishō period (1912-1926). In 1953 he campaigned for the release of 20 Communist factory workers accused of sabotaging a Japan National Railways freight train, publishing two novels on their behalf, and touring China in 1956 on a personal invitation from Zhou Enlai.
Uno died of pulmonary tuberculosis.