Chiyo Uno
was a female Japanese author who wrote several notable works and was a known kimono designer. She had a significant influence on Japanese fashion, film and literature.

Early years
Uno was born in a section of Iwakuni known as Kawanishi, "west of the river." Following an initial literary success and winning of a short story prize, Uno left her first husband and moved to Tokyo. Like many young Japanese of the 1920s, Uno was fascinated with American and European culture and dress and was one of the first women in Japan to bob her hair like a flapper. Beyond hairstyles, Uno also began to pursue the life of a free-spirited woman. She wanted to be a , or "modern girl", and not confined to just the role of supportive wife and mother. She became part of the Bohemian world of Tokyo, having liaisons with other writers, poets and painters.

Career
In 1933, Uno started publishing the serialised novel , which brought her much fame. The novel details an artist and his various love affairs, and a suicide attempt with his mistress. Uno not only had a romance with Seiji Tōgō, the artist on whose biography the novel was based on, but she then turned their involvement into a best-selling story. She also wrote convincingly from the perspective of a man in Confessions of Love, which further added to her book's appeal.

Shortly after the success of Confessions of Love, Uno started a magazine called , or Style, which was the first of its kind in Japan to focus on foreign fashions. In terms of her own native fashion, Uno also proved talented at designing kimono. Sutairu took up much of her time through the following decades, yet she continued to write and to intrigue a faithful audience of Japanese women, who found a sense of liberation in Uno's prose. Even if Uno's readers remained within conventional boundaries themselves, they could escape briefly through her stories of lovers and entanglements. And despite her obvious femininity, from Confessions of Love throughout her literary career, Uno was able to write skillfully from both male and female voices. Uno also became successful as a kimono designer, and along with her assistant designer Tomiyo Hanazawa, Uno traveled to the United States to stage the first kimono fashion show in the United States in 1957.

Later years
In later years, Uno's popularity was given formal status as she was recognized by the Emperor and assumed the honor of being one of Japan's oldest and most talented female writers. In 1983 she published the memoir I Will Go On Living (Ikite yuku watakushi), which was widely read and adapted for television. She frankly stated that the essence of her life was to have not followed anyone else's rules and to have done as she pleased. Married often with varying success, Uno found it difficult to stick with just one man, and it was said that she would even move to a new house every time a major affair or marriage ended.

Awards and honors
 1957, Noma Literary Prize

External links
 Prominent People of Minato City Chiyo Uno 
 Synopsis of Ohan at JLPP (Japanese Literature Publishing Project) 
 The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo. Rebecca L. Copeland (1992)

1897 births
1996 deaths
20th-century Japanese writers
20th-century Japanese women writers
Writers from Yamaguchi Prefecture