A vivid celebration of the artist covers her childhood and breakthrough in New York – while sidelining ‘that other business’

John Lennon once described Yoko Ono as “the world’s most famous unknown artist. Everybody knows her name, but nobody knows what she does.” Others were more vicious, portraying her as a family wrecker (the family being the Beatles), a cultural vandal, an Asian virus, a shrieking harridan. As ventriloquised by Paul Morley in his appallingly titled Love Magic Power Danger Bliss, they saw her as someone whose “sole reason to be on the planet was to drive them up the wall with her lack of talent and decency”. Or, only slightly more generously, a “disorganised diva channelling the assumed genius of male creators”.

Morley’s book focuses on Ono’s life and art before she ran into Lennon at London’s Indica Gallery in 1966. The Beatles he refers to as “that other business”. His Ono is headstrong, questing. Born in 1933, into a wealthy banking family (her schoolmates included the sons of Emperor Hirohito), she survived the firebombing of Tokyo and took refuge in the country where she and her mother, now virtual beggars, were mocked by locals. Later, she would become the first woman to be accepted into the prestigious Gakushuin University philosophy department. She left early, just as she would also leave Sarah Lawrence College in upstate New York after two terms.