“I found myself in a painting.
A loner swiftly roams
an empty field in summer.”
(Matsuo Basho)
A writer publishes a poem entitled “The Hunting Gun” in ‘The Hunter’s Friend’ magazine, neither claiming to be proficient in hunting activities nor wishing to promote this ‘art’ (much less hunting as “a healthy, manly sport”), but to impart something – quintessential from his point of view – about loneliness and about the way in which people can sometimes alleviate or overcome it. “Then, the background against which his back stood out lingered in front of my eyes – not the cold landscape of Mount Amagi in early winter but an empty, all-white riverbed.” But the appeal of the published poem is about to gain momentum: a few months later, the author of the text receives a letter signed by an unknown person, Jōsuke Misugi, revealing that he is the hunter figure described in the poem and that, indeed, he was the one who was spotted by the writer at the foot of Mount Amagi. And, as if this message were not enough to suggest to the respective poet that oftentimes art and life are just one step away, impressed by the expressiveness of the text and implicitly by the author’s perceptiveness, Jōsuke entrusts the latter with three letters sent to him not long ago by three women who used to weigh a lot in his life.
And what might have easily gained melodramatic, sentimental overtones becomes, just a few pages ahead, an outright, insightful study on – and about – love, as well as on its potential blowback if betrayed or kept secret; which stands proof that even an (apparently!) insignificant narrative pretext may become, if penned by a writer such as Yasushi Inoue, an extraordinary instance of great literature. Because, despite its scanty pages, “The Hunting Gun”, the novella published by the Japanese writer in 1949 and rewarded shortly after with plenty of literary prizes in Japan, is not simply a narrative gem, but mainly a text the meanings of which must be deciphered patiently and minutely.
The three feminine characters (Midori, the wife, Saiko, the mistress and Shōko, the latter’s daughter) write to Jōsuke, all tackling, in broad lines, the same events but looking at them from different angles – every one of them in quest of the truth, yet trying, at the same time, to relieve themselves from the burden of long-kept secrets. As in any epistolary narrative, the characters’ destinies permanently intersect and intertwine and the writer suggests that sometimes beauty and self-fulfilment are nothing more than the masks underneath which unhappiness and death lie in wait. Because the three letters recompose, by and large, one and the same story, but then again, each captures yet another facet of the events; and one of Inoue’s unmistakable merits is that he makes his readers wonder, every step of the way, what – or which – the truth is, under these circumstances… Shōko, the teenage sender of the first letter, unexpectedly finds out, upon reading her mother’s diary, which she was asked to burn, about Saiko’s clandestine, lifelong love feelings for Jōsuke, their best friend and the husband of Midori, her mother’s close friend. Midori’s letter reveals to Jōsuke the fact that she has known about his affair with Saiko and that, after years in which she has tried to find illusory solace in one-off romances, she has decided to get a divorce. And the last letter, written by Saiko, is intended as a ravaging good-bye addressed to Jōsuke before she commits suicide: “When you read my letter, I shall no longer be among you. I do not know what death is, but I am convinced that the joys, troubles and torments will be gone with it.”
Loneliness, disappointment, one’s inability to communicate even with the closest ones: “The Hunting Gun” depicts them all and many more at that while remaining, from the very first page to the last, a disarmingly simple text, crystal-clear and equally profound in ways in which few of the twentieth-century fiction writings succeeded to be in a mere handful of pages. Inoue treads on the territory of the most intimate feelings, assessing the manifold potential disappointments that are always carefully hidden behind social conventions or personal masks, and the protagonists of this book hide the truth from those around them without, however, realizing that in thus doing they merely hide from themselves and that, at every turn, they are at risk of evanescing in the everyday nothingness and of losing themselves; moreover – and worse – they are at risk of losing precisely those whom they care about most. It is only after Saiko’s death under such tragic circumstances that the three of them break the silence and the revelation of the truth which he has ignored for so many years makes Jōsuke break down, only to feel that he no longer has any point of reference or purpose in life. Midori leaves him: (“Oh, how difficult it is to write a good-bye letter!”) and Shōko decides to never see him again (“I never wish to ever meet you again, you or Aunt Midori.”) With a perfect technique of gradation and an excellent dosage of the significant detail Inoue tells, with an amazing ostensible calm, a story of betrayed love which does not, however, acquire any adulterine overtones but is outright fraught with Euripidean contours. Moreover, the manner in which Midori devises her confession-discourse calls to mind Nora’s attitude in Ibsen’s play: “I am seriously thinking about starting it all over again and going my own way, to find real happiness there. My unexpected proposition might take you by surprise, but it should surprise you even more that until now I have not asked you to break up with me.” Shōko feels betrayed, Midori feels cheated on and lied to, while Saiko feels infamous. For every one of them, Saiko’s death suddenly forces open a gate that they have all thought locked forever: for Shōko, the previous naïve representation of love crumbles in an instant, while for Midori it becomes pointless to hold on, for the sake of conventions and appearances, to a marriage that ceased to exist years ago and that has died out steadily but inevitably: “You have grown colder and colder, just like hot iron slowly grows cold. Neither have I allowed myself to be outdone, so that my unruffled indifference has estranged you all the more, even leading to an exaggerated aloofness on your part. Do you know what I compare the sensation back then with? With some eyelashes covered with white frost, redolent of the wonderful glacial family nowadays.”
But, in spite of all the suffering that every one of these letters carries, none requires an answer. Because, in writing to Jōsuke and in addressing the letters to him in a more or less formal tone, what Saiko, Midori and Shōko did was try, years later, to (re)discover themselves. Read in this key, the letters almost disallow the addressee to reply, as they seem meant to sanction the break rather than to mediate any potential reconnection. Having achieved literary renown in the Japanese cultural space relatively late, Yasushi Inoue (1907-1991) was nevertheless a prolific writer, whilst little known in the West, where the fame of Kawabata’s traditional, delicate fiction writing, the shock produced by Mishima’s ‘Baroque’ prose-work or the sensualism of Tanizaki’s literary work made it somehow difficult for Inoue’s fiction work to be received for its genuine worth even if, in Japan, he has always been regarded as one of the canonical writers of the post-War age. And even if there were critics who believed that “The Bullfight”, Inoue’s debut text in prose fiction, offered readers all the characteristic features of a new type of prose, rough as a diamond in its apparently clear simplicity, “The Hunting Gun” also displays additional elements that single out this piece of writing in the context of twentieth-century fiction: not only by the author’s ability to avail himself of the epistolary technique and to give substance to a love triangle but also by his carving, on a literary level, under the form of the letters that make up the book, genuine instances of Japanese traditional painting technique, in the style of the famous ‘Ukyo-e’ art during the Edo period. Hence of course, the particular meaning which the writer ascribes to and the sense in which he depicts nature, the one suited to enhance the feelings of the characters otherwise trapped amidst a world in which everything unfolds with doors closed and behind closed doors. The natural world thus becomes a sort of sensory theatre against which all the dramatic moments experienced by the three women and by Jōsuke take place. Moreover, Inoue also has a keen sense of the symbol-objects – not of the hunting gun alone (although the truly hypnotic scene in which Midori is gazing at the reflected image of her husband holding the gun in his hand and is waiting, not by a long shot inapprehensive, to be aimed at and to hear the pull of the trigger is a highly accomplished one) but also of the bluish-grey silk kimono adorned with violet thistle flowers. “It is a haori with memories”, as Midori would point out to Saiko a few days before her suicide, thus disclosing that she had known about Jōsuke’s extramarital affair all along. Certainly, the splendid garment has a double role: it is both the poison that funnels Midori’s agony and the antidote that will relieve her from the burden of that long-kept secret. But, paradoxical though it may seem, relief is what Saiko will experience as well, once she intimates that the secret has been shared by three persons, not two, as she has believed all along. The beautiful thistle-print haori, the snake that seems to warm its way into the hearts of everyone or the boat ablaze, adrift in the storm, are compelling images that run throughout the text and impel the two lovers to place themselves outside the social norms: “Should we be wrongdoers, at least let us be unsurpassed and let us not merely cheat on Midori but connive the whole world. That night the hopeless fate of our love was revealed to me in the image of the boat consumed by flames, that went unnoticed in the open sea.”
The feminine portraits – the wife’s on the one hand and the mistress’s on the other hand – mirror each other at all times and so does their sorrow, in that Saiko is trying to bear hers, sensing the blame of the ones around her and blaming herself as well, while Midori finds distraction in casual dalliances, lest she should kill herself. The melancholy that pervades many of the pages of the text is amazingly evoked, and so is the distinct ambience – impossible to forget even after a hasty read -, with stylistic devices used sparingly, in a manner obviously akin to the art of the haiku (hence Inoue’s profuse lyricism) and with a narrative ease difficult to match even by the masters of Japanese prose, both of which make “The Hunting Gun” one of the masterpieces of Japanese fiction writing. A book that seems to acquire, every once in a while, orchestral tones and light dabs of Japanese engraving, intent on never suggesting its readers even the slightest gleam of elucidation, be it implicitly, but on the contrary, on making them ponder on loneliness, death and love, like Saiko, who at one time wondered: “What is, I wonder, that terrible torment in the soul of a dreadfully sad person?”
Translated into English by Mirela PETRAȘCU
Yasushi Inoue, “The Hunting Gun”/ “Puşca de vânătoare”, translation into Romanian and notes by Angela Hondru, Humanitas Fiction Publishing House, Bucharest, third edition, 2024
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