“It is just too long and it will be too expensive and it will kill off the market,” Peter wrote to me about my manuscript.

His tone was brutal, and so was his prediction. No writer wants to “kill off” their market.
At long last Peter and I had secured a contract with author Uno Chiyo and agent Akiko Kurita for the translation of The Story of a Single Woman (Aru hitori no onna no hanashi).

Now Peter was working with Bill Hamilton, the director of the University of Hawai’i Press on potentially publishing my manuscript The Sound of the Wind: The Life and Works of Uno Chiyo, in the UK and Europe.

The Sound of the Wind, which I had already contracted with Hawai’i to publish, featured translations of three of Uno’s stories and a substantial biography. With an eye towards his market overseas, Peter worried that the biography was too “academic.” He was particularly unsettled by the inclusion of “The Puppet Maker: Tenguya Kyūkichi” among the three stories, as he felt it didn’t “fit.” Both the lengthy biography and the puppet maker’s discourse on art were “market killers”!

Initially, I had sent my manuscript to Tuttle, thinking only to publish the translation of the novella The Sound of the Wind (Kaze no oto). I worked with Ken Mori, who was then an editor—he’s now the President—and he was very kind to me. (I think at the time, he went by Ken Mori Wong. Or, maybe that was a different Mori.)

He marked up a few pages of my translation, pointing out where I needed to re-structure my sentences so that they were more naturally English and less obviously “translated.”

Draft of The Sound of the Wind opening pages with Ken Mori’s edits.

“Opening gives reader strong impression of voice of narrator—try to match that style and consistency in English,” he wrote by hand in the margins of the typed manuscript I sent him.

If I recall, we met in person to discuss the project, and he sent me home with one and half pages of handwritten comments.

He declined to pursue publication, but the time he spent with me and the advice he offered were invaluable.

I took his comments to heart, tried to make my translation more natural, and then turned to the University of Hawai’i Press. I knew they planned to publish Phyllis Birnbaum’s translation of Uno’s 1935 novel, Confession of Love (Irozange, 1989), and I thought they might be willing to follow it up with another Uno book.

I was right.

Stuart Kiang responded to my query letter, surprising me by suggesting I be more ambitious.

“Why don’t you include an extensive biography?” he wrote. “And add more translations.”

I was delighted by the suggestions.

Now my book would resemble Robert Danly’s study of Higuchi Ichiyō, In the Shade of Spring Leaves, which had come out in 1981. I had read that volume cover to cover and was keen to model my own book after his.

(Which is somewhat ironic, since when Danly reviewed my book several years after it was published, he trashed the format—and pretty much everything else about my work: “If Copeland’s book is a worthy successor to the life-and-works tradition, this very succession begins to make one yearn for something new.” Ouch. Even after all these years, it still stings.)

Of course, when I began preparing my book for Hawai’i, I was completely unaware that I was dragging around a tired “life-and-works tradition”! I selected the three works because I thought they represented the diversity of Uno’s writing styles and nicely amplified important moments in her career.

The first selection, “This Powder Box” (Kono oshiroi-ire, 1967), a fictionalized memoir, returns Uno to her memories of Tōgō Seiji and the tumultuous love affair they had in the 1930s. I thought the story would interest readers of Uno’s Confessions of Love, which follows Jōji, who we are meant to understand is modeled on Tōgō, through his love affairs with three women.

The Sound of the Wind (Kaze no oto, 1969), the longest in the collection, is set in an earlier era—before Japan modernized—and provides a fascinating companion piece to Uno’s Ohan (1957), which many consider her masterpiece.

Ohan (translated by Donald Keene in 1961) is the story of a hapless man who leaves his wife and child to live with a geisha. Seven years later, he unexpectedly meets his wife while out for a stroll and finds himself drawn to her again. The narrative, told in the man’s voice (as was Confessions of Love), describes his inability to settle with either his wife or his mistress. He loves them both.

The Sound of the Wind offers a wife’s story. Osen is married off to Seikichi, the ne’er-do-well second son of the Yoshino family, when she is just a girl. “Married off” isn’t the right word. He is brought into her family as the adopted husband and behaves just as he pleases, squandering the family money on racing horses and a geisha named Oyuki. Despite the humiliation he brings to her, Osen is irresistibly drawn to Seikichi. She is even attracted to Oyuki herself.

Like Ohan, the story is narrated in dialect. Ohan, Uno contended, was told via a dialect she had concocted herself, a blend of speech patterns from different regions in the Kansai. The story reverberates with the traces of the gidayū chanter, and in fact, the novella was adapted and performed in the puppet theater.

The Sound of the Wind uses the Iwakuni-dialect Uno spoke as a child. Whereas Ohan took her ten years to write—so meticulous was Uno in crafting her dialect—The Sound of the Wind was much less involved.

At least for the author.

For me as translator it took considerable effort to try to suggest the flavor of the regional tones—and also of a bygone Japan—without resorting to hackneyed phrases or my own familiar accents.

I remember showing my sister Beth one of my early drafts and she told me the characters sounded like they were straight out of Mayberry—a reference to the TV show we watched as children starring Andy Griffith as a kindly sheriff in small-town North Carolina.

It was Beth who suggested I romanize certain Japanese words—like Okaka, instead of using the English equivalent, Mama—to help break the spell of the American South while also retaining something of the Japanese accent.

Working on The Sound of the Wind that year in Tokyo was magical. Some days I would visit with a Japanese neighbor, Mrs. Higashi, who was married to a physics professor at ICU to ask her about passages I didn’t understand. I loved listening to her read the passages aloud to me.

My third selection, “The Puppet Maker” (Ningyōshi Tenguya Kyūkichi)—the one that Peter wanted to delete from the UK version of the work—was similarly narrated in dialect and was a work Uno wrote in the early 1940s, some years before she began writing Ohan.

The story is narrated in the form of an interview, with an unnamed woman from Tokyo speaking to a venerable puppet maker in Tokushima about his art.

The woman, a reflection of Uno herself, chances upon a puppet on display at her editor’s house and decides then and there she must learn more about the carver. She knows nothing of the puppet theater and although she is Japanese herself, she feels as if she were entering an entirely foreign world. She speaks to the puppet carver in standard Japanese. He responds in Tokushima dialect.

Here Uno captures for readers another male narrator. Over the span of her career, she wrote a number of stories from the perspective of a male character, which is unusual among women writers.

I thought it was important to highlight this work for that reason, but also because it so brilliantly captures the encounter between cultures—the fast-paced, urbane world of mid-20th century Japan, as represented by the woman, and the sepia-toned world of an art form slowly slipping into the past. Uno crystallizes this world, just before it disappears forever.

Peter Owen didn’t see the importance of the work, though:

I have looked at THE PUPPET MAKER story again and I have discussed it with my people here. We . . . would prefer to do the two stories without THE PUPPET MAKER, as that way there would be two stories with autobiographical themes. If we did the three it would then be a volume of stories which is a bad sales pitch and also THE PUPPET MAKER is completely different material – it’s really an interview which she did with someone and doesn’t relate to her life at all.

I found it interesting that Peter considered the novella, The Sound of the Wind, autobiographical but not “The Puppet Maker.” The former was loosely based on Uno’s memories of her father, but it was highly stylized. The latter, of course, was derived from meetings she had with the puppet carver, Tenguya Kyūkichi, in Tokushima, but it also carried deep resonances about Uno’s own regard of art—of HER art—and not just the art of carving puppet heads.

The work was deeply personal. Perhaps even more so than The Sound of the Wind.

In the same letter Peter acknowledged a potential future for the story:

If the two stories sell we might perhaps do THE PUPPET MAKER on its own as a paperback with illustrations, but our feeling at the moment is that Chiyo is not well enough known outside Japan to do that on its own at the present. It is very much a curiosity and Japanese material and would have a limited appeal in my opinion here and in Europe.

In hindsight I see that for Peter, Uno’s attractiveness was her sexuality, her many romances and her eagerness to sensationalize them in print. Sexy Uno was someone he could market as scandalous and insouciant, a rule-breaker and trail blazer, “Japan’s Colette.”

Her more sober rumination on art in “The Puppet Maker,” written during the dark days of the Pacific War, was a hard sell.

“Thank you for your letter of 30 January,” I wrote to him meekly on February 27, 1991. I was eager to get the contract for the UK book project underway.

“As concerns your decision to exclude “The Puppet Maker” from the book published in the UK, I have no objections. Of course, from a literary point of view, this is one of Uno’s finest works. But you know your readers, and since the work will be published elsewhere, I do not mind terribly.”

In the end, Peter published the Hawai’i book with all three stories and only slight changes to the introduction. The most substantial change was to the title: The Sound of the Wind: A Biography by Rebecca Copeland with Three Novellas.

Over the years I have read “This Powder Box” in translation with students; but it is “The Puppet Maker” that is the most versatile. I require it in courses on theater, translation, war writing, and women’s writing. Students find it exceptionally moving.

When Uno wrote “The Puppet Maker” there was some fear that Kyūkichi’s art form was soon to disappear. He had no true heir and the world—rocked by war—was changing. In her narrative, she preserves the old man’s voice, his memories, his reflections on his craft and in this way ensures that they all endure as long as readers read.

Perhaps then Peter’s instincts about publishing this work in a standalone volume was right all along. I can imagine a book with a generous introduction to Tokushima and the puppet theater, Uno’s beautiful story, along with glossy photographs of Kyūkichi’s works.

It’s not too late!