The Hunting Gun (Pushkin Collection) Read online

  When I was a girl, Mother used to tell me this story about a wolf who was enchanted by the devil and tricked a little rabbit. The wolf was turned into a stone for what he did. Mother tricked me, and she tricked Aunt Midori, and she tricked everyone else… it’s just incomprehensible. The devil who enchanted her must have been one terrible devil. Come to think of it, Mother used the word wicked in her diary. The two of you were going to be wicked, she said, and if you were going to do it anyway you might as well be thoroughly evil. Why didn’t she write that she had been possessed by the devil? My poor mother, so much unluckier than the wolf who tricked the rabbit! And to think someone as gentle as Mother, and as gentle as you, Uncle Jōsuke, whom I love so much, could have decided to be wicked—to be evil, in fact! How heartbreaking to love someone, but only be able to hold on to that love if you give yourself up to evil! When I was a girl, someone once bought me a round glass paperweight with a fake red petal inside it during the festival for Shōten at the temple in Nishimiya. I took it in my hand and started walking, but before long I began to cry. I’m sure at the time no one understood why I had suddenly burst into tears. I had been overcome by sadness, all at once, because I imagined how that petal must feel, frozen in the cold glass, motionless, even when spring came, and then when autumn came, poor petal, crucified in the glass. I feel the same sadness now. Your poor love, sad as that petal!

  *

  Uncle, Uncle Jōsuke.

  You must be very angry with me for secretly reading Mother’s diary. But the day before she died, I had a premonition, I guess you could say—a feeling that came over me all at once, just like that, that she wasn’t going to recover. Her death was getting closer. I felt it in her somewhere, something bad. You know as well as I do, Uncle, that for the past six months there seemed to be nothing wrong with her except for a slight, persistent fever—she still had her appetite, and in fact her cheeks glowed more than before, and she put on weight. But recently when I saw her from behind, when I looked at the line from her shoulders down to her arms, especially, she seemed so forlorn that I felt a kind of foreboding. The day before Mother died, Aunt Midori came by for a visit, and when I went to Mother’s room to tell her and slid her door open I was so surprised that I almost gasped. She was kneeling on the floor facing the other way, wearing a haori of greyish-blue Yūki silk with a large thistle woven across the back. She had told me once that I could have it because it was too gaudy for her at her age, and then she had wrapped it in paper and put it away in the chest of drawers, and for years she had almost never taken it out. I couldn’t stop myself from blurting out—

  “What are you doing?”

  Mother turned to face me, looking puzzled.

  “I mean…” I started, but then I couldn’t continue. A second later I couldn’t even see why I had been so taken aback in the first place, and the whole thing seemed funny. Mother loved kimono, and she used to take out old, flashy pieces and try them on all the time—in fact, when she got sick it became almost part of her daily routine to take some kimono she hadn’t worn in years out of the chest and put it on, and she had been choosing bolder and bolder designs, maybe to cheer herself up. When I thought about it later, though, I realized that it really had been a shock to see her in that Yūki haori. Because she was so beautiful it was like being woken up all at once from a deep sleep—I’m not exaggerating. And at the same time, I had never in my life seen her looking as lonely as she did at that moment. Aunt Midori was behind me, and when she stepped into the room she commented right away on how lovely Mother looked, and then sat for a time without speaking, lost in admiration.

  The beautiful but lonely feeling that came over me when I saw Mother in that haori, sitting with her back to me, stayed there inside me all day, like a cold weight that had settled in my heart.

  In the evening, the wind that had been blowing since morning died down, so Sadayo and I raked up the leaves that had fallen in the garden and burned them. While I was at it, I thought I would bring out a bundle of straw I had bought a few days earlier for way too much and burn it to make ash for Mother’s hibachi. As I was doing that, Mother, who had been sitting inside, watching me through the glass doors, came out onto the verandah with a package wrapped in clean brown paper.

  “Burn this too, please!” she said.

  When I asked what it was, she snapped in an unusually sharp tone that it was nothing, just burn it. I guess she felt bad, though, because she said softly, “It’s a diary. My diary.” She told me once more that she wanted it burnt, and then she spun on her heel and walked off down the hall, her gait oddly unstable, as if she were being carried along by the wind.

  It took about half an hour to make the ash. By the time the last straw had flared and gone up in a line of purplish smoke, I had made my decision. I took Mother’s diary and quietly went upstairs to my room, and then hid it at the back of a shelf. That night, the wind blew up again. When I looked out of my window, the garden was bathed in the light of an almost ferociously white moon, and it had a sort of barren air, like some rocky coast up north, and the roar of the wind sounded like waves pounding the shore. Mother and Sadayo had gone to bed ages ago, so I was the only one up. I stacked five or six heavy encyclopedia volumes by the door so it wouldn’t open right away if someone tried it, and I pulled the curtain all the way shut—even the moonlight pouring into my room scared me!—and then finally I adjusted the shade on my lamp and placed a single college notebook down on my desk. That notebook was what had emerged from the brown wrapping paper. That notebook was Mother’s diary.

  *

  Uncle, Uncle Jōsuke.

  I was scared that if I just let this opportunity go by, I would never learn what happened between Mother and Father. Until then, I hadn’t wanted to know about Father, not until the time came for me to get married myself and Mother told me. I kept the name Kadota Reiichirō tucked away deep inside my heart, and that was enough. But when I saw Mother earlier that day, sitting with her back to me in the Yūki haori, I changed my mind. For some reason, I felt absolutely certain that Mother was not going to recover—I felt it in my heart.

  At some point, I had learnt from my grandmother in Akashi and other relatives why Mother had to break up with Father. It had happened when I was five, and I was living in Akashi with Mother, her parents and the maids while Father was at his university in Kyoto, doing research for his degree in the paediatrics department. One blustery day in April, a young woman came to see Mother with a newborn infant in her arms. As soon as she had come up into the house, she laid the baby down in the alcove, undid her obi, and started changing into an under-kimono she took from a little basket she had brought. Mother was stunned when she came back with the tea. The woman was genuinely crazy. Later, they learnt that the frail-looking baby in the alcove, dozing under the red nandina berries that had been hung there, was her child by my father.

  Soon after that the baby died. Fortunately the woman’s mental issues were just temporary, though, and she was back to her usual self almost immediately. I hear she married into a merchant household in Okayama, and she’s still living there happily. Mother ran away from her parents’ house in Akashi not long after that incident, taking me along, and Father, whom her parents had adopted so that he would be part of the family, ended up leaving it again. I remember my grandmother telling me when I started school, “There was no point making a stink, but then Saiko always was a stubborn one, even when there wasn’t anything to be done.” I guess the thought of forgiving him offended Mother’s moral sense. That was as much as I knew about what had happened. Until I turned seven or eight, I thought Father was dead. They let me believe that. To tell the truth, even now, in my heart, Father is dead. I hear he runs a big hospital in Hyōgo, not an hour away, and that he has stayed single, even after all this time; but however hard I try I just can’t imagine him, my real father. That man may be alive, in reality, but my father has been dead for ages.

  *

  I opened the first page of Mother’s diary.
And how surprised I was to find that the first word my hungry gaze landed upon was sin—yes, sin. Several times in a row—SIN SIN SIN—the handwriting so coarse I could hardly believe it was Mother’s. And then, under all those piled-up SINs, scrawled out as if the words themselves were being crushed by their weight: “Oh Lord forgive me—Midori-san, forgive me.” That was all I saw. The rest of the writing on the page had melted away, leaving just that one line, like a devil living there, glaring at me so fiercely it seemed it was about to spring.

  I slammed the diary shut. I can hardly express how dreadful that moment was. The whole house was perfectly still, except for the loud pounding of my heart. I got up, checked that the door and the windows were still shut tight, and then I went back to my desk, screwed up my courage, and opened the diary again. I felt like the devil myself, now, as I read the whole thing—every word, from start to finish. But Mother hadn’t written a single line relating to my father, the man I had been so curious about in the first place—the whole diary was focused on her relationship with you, things I never even dreamt were possible, spelt out in language so wild I would never have imagined Mother had it in her. Sometimes she suffered, sometimes she was overjoyed, sometimes she prayed, or hoped, or resolved to die—yes, it’s true, she made up her mind any number of times to commit suicide. She would kill herself if Aunt Midori ever learnt about her relationship with you, that was her plan. She always seemed so bright, to enjoy talking with Aunt Midori… who could have guessed she was so terrified of her?

  Reading her diary, I learnt that for thirteen years Mother lived with the weight of death always bearing down on her shoulders. Sometimes the entries would continue four or five days in a row, and then for two or three months she wouldn’t write a word, but it was clear on every page that Mother was face-to-face with death. “Yes, why don’t you just die, if I were dead all my problems would be solved…” Oh, what could have made her write such desperate, unthinking words? “What need have I to be afraid of anything, now that I have resolved to die? Forget your shame, Saiko! Be more bold!” What could have led a woman as gentle as Mother to write something so careless and self-centred? Was it really love? That beautiful, shining thing we call love? You gave me a book for my birthday one year, Uncle, with a picture of a naked woman standing tall and proud by a beautiful fountain, her long, full hair streaming around her chest, cupping her hands around her slightly upturned, bud-like breasts… This, the book explained, was love. But oh, Uncle, the love you and Mother shared was nothing at all like that!

  Now that I have read Mother’s diary, Aunt Midori scares me more than anything else in the world, just as she did Mother. I’ve inherited the pain of Mother’s secret. Aunt Midori, who used to pucker up her lips and kiss my cheek! Aunt Midori, whom I loved every bit as much as Mother! I’m pretty sure that when I started first grade in Ashiya, Aunt Midori was the one who gave me a new backpack with giant roses all over it. And when I went on my first school trip to the seaside in Tangoyura, she gave me a big inflatable ring that looked like a seagull. For the arts festival in second grade, I told the story of Tom Thumb—the Grimm brothers fairy tale—and when I got all that applause, it was because Aunt Midori had kept listening to me practise, night after night, giving me rewards when I did a good job. And I could keep going and going—Aunt Midori is there in all my childhood memories. Mother’s cousin, her closest friend. Now Aunt Midori only dances, but she used to be so good at mahjong and golf and swimming and skiing. The pies she baked were bigger than my face. I remember she came over once with a whole group of Takarazuka actresses to surprise us. Oh, why has Aunt Midori always been such an important part of our lives, filling it with her bright light, as carefree as a rose?

  *

  I don’t know if people really have premonitions, but I had something like that about you and Mother once—just once. It was about a year ago. I was going to school with my friends, and when we got to Hankyū Shukugawa Station, I realized I had left my extra-curricular English reader at home. So I asked my friends to wait for me and went back alone to get it, and then when I came to our gate, for some reason I just couldn’t go in. The maid had been out running errands all morning, so I knew Mother was the only one in the house. And yet somehow, her being there all alone made me uneasy. I was scared. I stood outside the gate for a while, staring at the azaleas, trying to decide if I should go in or not. In the end I gave up on my reader and walked back to Shukugawa, where my friends were waiting. It was really weird—even I couldn’t say why I had acted that way. I had the feeling that from the moment I walked out of the gate to go to school, just a little while before, a time that belonged only to Mother had started flowing through the house. And she wouldn’t want me to intrude, she would look very sad if I did—that was the sense I had. So I went back along the street beside the Ashiya River, feeling an indescribable loneliness, kicking stones as I went, and when I got to the station I sat in the waiting room, leaning against the bench, hardly hearing my friends talking.

  Nothing like that had happened before, or ever happened again. It fills me with horror, though, just thinking that I could have such a premonition. How frightening are the things we have inside us! Who knows, maybe at some point, somewhere along the way, Aunt Midori had exactly the same sort of baseless intuition that I had? How can we be sure that she didn’t? When we played cards, she was always so proud that she could sniff out what her opponents were thinking—her nose was even better than a pointer’s. Oh, just the thought makes my blood run cold. Of course, I know it’s silly of me to worry, that she probably never knew. And it’s all over now. The secret has been kept. No, it wasn’t just kept—Mother died to protect it. I’m sure of that.

  On that awful day, just before Mother began suffering so terribly—her pain was so excruciating that I couldn’t even watch, even though it lasted only a little while—Mother called me to her side. Her skin was so eerily smooth then that she looked like a puppet. “I took poison just now,” she said. “I’m tired, too tired to go on living.” Her voice was so strangely clear that it was like listening to music from heaven, as if she weren’t speaking to me at all, but through me to God. And then I heard, very distinctly, the sound of that stack of words I had seen in her diary the night before—SIN SIN SIN, piled as high as the Eiffel Tower—crashing down on top of her. The whole weight of the building she had erected from her sins over the course of the past thirteen years, all those floors, was crushing her exhausted body, carrying it off. And then, as I sat on the floor by her futon, weary and dazed, following her distant, unfocused gaze with my own, I felt a sudden surge of anger, like a tempest blowing up from a valley. Something like anger, anyway. An indescribable resentment towards something, seething and boiling away inside me. I kept looking at Mother’s sad face, and I said nonchalantly, as though none of what was happening had anything to do with me, “Oh? Did you?” And the next second, my heart felt cold and clear, as if someone had poured water over it. I got up, so calm and collected that even I felt kind of surprised at myself, and then, without taking a short cut across the room to go out the other side, I went into the hall and turned the corner, feeling like the floor was made of water—this was when I heard Mother start screaming from the pain as death’s muddy torrent surged over her—and I went down the long hall into the little room at the end where we kept the telephone, and called you, Uncle. Five minutes later someone threw the front door open on its track with a great clatter and stumbled up into the house, but it wasn’t you, it was Aunt Midori. And so, when Mother breathed her last, Aunt Midori, whom she had been closer to than anyone, and whom she had feared above all else, was holding her hand, and it was Aunt Midori who spread a white cloth over Mother’s face as she lay there, unable any more to feel pain or sadness.

  *

  Uncle, Uncle Jōsuke.

  That first night, the night of the wake, the house was so quiet it was almost unearthly. The stream of visitors coming and going all day—the police, the doctor, the neighbours—had stopped
just like that when night came, so only you and Aunt Midori and I were left kneeling in front of the coffin, and not one of us said a word, as if we were all concentrating on the soft lapping of water somewhere outside. Each time an incense stick burned out, we took turns rising to light another and pray before Mother’s photograph, or gently open a window to clear the air. You seemed saddest of us all, Uncle. Whenever you got up to light a new stick, you would peer intently at Mother’s picture, unmoving, a look in your eyes that was calmer than anything, and then, still wearing the same sorrowful look, you would smile ever so faintly—so faintly that no one else would even see it. I can’t tell you how many times I found myself thinking, that night, that however much Mother suffered, maybe in the end one has to say that she lived a happy life.

  Around nine o’clock, when I had stood and gone over to the window, I suddenly burst out crying. You came and rested your hand gently on my shoulder, and stayed for a moment without speaking, and then you went silently back and sat down. What made me cry, then, wasn’t a sudden welling-up of sadness at Mother’s death. I had been remembering how, earlier in the day, when Mother spoke for the last time, she hadn’t mentioned you or even said your name, and then I’d started wondering why, when I called and told you what had happened, you hadn’t come rushing over yourself, you, not Aunt Midori, and as I thought about it all a deep sadness suddenly took hold of me. It struck me that your love for each other, the love that had made it necessary for you to keep play-acting until the last, was as unfortunate as that petal crucified in the glass. Then I got to my feet and opened the window, and as I was standing there looking up at the cold, starry sky, struggling to keep my sadness from overflowing, I had the thought that at that moment Mother’s love was climbing up into the blackness, unknown to anyone, unseen, speeding up through the stars, and then I just couldn’t bear it any more. My own sadness at the death of the woman I had known as my mother couldn’t compare, I thought, to the profundity of the sadness of that love that was rising into the sky right then.