The Hunting Gun Read online

  At dinner, as we were about to start eating our sushi, I burst into tears again.

  “You must be strong,” Aunt Midori murmured quietly, gently. “It hurts me so that I can’t do anything to help.”

  When I wiped away my tears and glanced up, Aunt Midori was watching me, her eyes brimming just like mine. I gazed into those beautiful, moist eyes and shook my head without saying anything. I doubt she paid any attention to that gesture. But the truth is, I had started crying because suddenly I pitied her. Aunt Midori arranged some sushi on a plate as an offering to Mother, then took some for you, and for me, and then finally for herself, and as I watched her transfer the pieces of sushi onto each of the four plates, for some reason I felt that she was the most unlucky of us all, and that feeling came out of me in the form of sobbing.

  I cried once more that night. This was after you and Aunt Midori told me I should get some sleep so I would be ready for everything the next day, and I spread my futon in the other room and lay down. I was so worn out from dealing with people all day that I fell asleep immediately, but then I started awake, drenched in sweat. I looked at the clock on the staggered shelves in the alcove and saw that about an hour had passed. The next room, where the coffin was, was still just as quiet as before; apart from the occasional click of your lighter, I didn’t hear a sound. Then, after thirty minutes or so, you and Aunt Midori had a brief exchange.

  “Why don’t you rest a little,” you said. “I’ll stay up.”

  “I’m all right. Why don’t you go.”

  That was all. After that, it was silent again; no matter how long I waited, nothing broke the stillness. I sobbed violently three times as I lay on my futon. You and Aunt Midori probably didn’t hear me that time. I cried then because the whole world seemed so lonesome and sad and scary. You and Mother, who was a Buddha now, and Aunt Midori—the three of you were all there together, in the same room. Each of you was silent, lost in your own thoughts. The adult world was so lonesome, scary and sad that I could hardly bear it.

  *

  Uncle, Uncle Jōsuke.

  I know I’ve been rambling. But I wanted to explain to you exactly how I feel right now, so that you will understand the favour I am going to ask of you.

  This is what I want: never to see either you or Aunt Midori again. I can’t take advantage of your kindness the way I used to, in all my innocence, before I read that diary, and I can’t continue to be as trustingly selfish as I’ve always been with Aunt Midori. I want to get away from here, from the rubble of words that crushed Mother, all that sin. I don’t have the energy to say anything more.

  I plan to leave this house in Ashiya in the care of a relative in Akashi, a man named Tsumura, and then, at least for the time being, go back to Akashi and open a small dress-making shop so that I can support myself. In the letter Mother left for me when she died, she said I should go to you whenever I needed help or advice, but if she had known me as I am now I know she would not have said that.

  I burned Mother’s diary in the garden today. That single college notebook was reduced to almost nothing, just a handful of ash, and while I was off fetching a bucket to douse it a little whirlwind blew up and carried the ash away somewhere with the fallen leaves.

  I will send a letter Mother wrote to you under separate cover. I found it when I was going through the things in her desk the day after you left for Tokyo.

  MIDORI’S LETTER

  Mr Misugi Jōsuke,

  Writing the characters of your name in this proper manner, I find, despite my age—not that thirty-three is all that old—that my heart begins to flutter, as if this were a love letter. Looking back over the past decade, I am puzzled to realize that, while I have written dozens of love letters, some in secret but others quite openly, not one was ever addressed to you. One finds it difficult to comprehend. I do not mean this as a joke; I have been mulling earnestly over this, and it has left me feeling an odd, rankling sort of incomprehension. Does it amuse you, perhaps, that I should feel this way?

  Some time ago, Mr Takagi’s wife—you remember her, I am sure… the woman whose face makes her look like a fox when she gets all dressed up—offered her appraisal of various notable personages of the Hanshin region, and when she arrived at you she made several very impolite pronouncements: that you were not a man to make a woman happy; that you hadn’t a clue about the delicate workings of the feminine heart; that you might fall for a woman, but no woman could possibly fall for you. It goes without saying that Mrs Takagi uttered these unfortunate words under the influence of some degree of inebriation, and you need not take her evaluation so very seriously; still, you know as well as I do that there is that side to your character. You live, I think it is fair to say, a life entirely free of loneliness. You are not one to yearn for companionship the moment you are on your own. You may sometimes look bored, but never lonesome. And you have a tendency to see things in an oddly clear-cut fashion, and to be absolutely convinced of the superiority of your own views. You may say this is merely a sign of confidence, but watching you one is possessed somehow by an urge to seize you and give you a shake. In a word, I suppose one might describe you as a man utterly intolerable to women, completely devoid of an endearingly human side, who in no way makes it worth the trouble of doing you the favour of falling for you.

  Perhaps, then, I am demanding too much of you in my fretful attempts to communicate some sense of my befuddlement at the absence, among the dozens of love letters I have penned, of even one bearing your name. Nevertheless the feeling remains. Surely I could have written you one or two, at least? To be sure, from a certain perspective one might argue that, while the epistles were not addressed to you, the emotions I felt during their writing were—they simply ended up in the wrong hands, and thus, as far as my sentiments were concerned, I might as well have been addressing you. My retiring nature inhibited me, a grown woman, from plying my husband with cloyingly intimate letters of the sort one might expect of a young and inexperienced girl, that was the difficulty—and so I dashed off letters to other men, men towards whom I felt no such diffidence. I suppose in the end the stars simply were not aligned in my favour, so to speak—I was born to this misfortune. And it was yours, as well.

  What are you doing now

  I wonder, knowing full well

  that if I were to approach

  your lofty repose might

  crumble

  This is a poem I composed last autumn as an outlet for my mood on a day when you were holed up in your study and my thoughts kept turning to you. You were staring at a Yi-dynasty porcelain or some such thing, waiting to see which of you would blink first, and I was unwilling to disturb your peace—or rather, I knew of no means by which I could possibly disturb it, much as I may have liked to… Oh, my dear husband, how maddeningly well you hold your fortress, impenetrable on every front!… and this work brims with your poor wife’s sorrow at that moment. You will say I am a liar, no doubt. But even if I do stay up all night playing mahjong, there is still time enough for me to turn my feelings, like surreptitious glances, towards the annexe and your study. Needless to say, even this poem did not find its way to you: in the end, I left it in Dr Taue’s apartment, laying it softly on his desk—Dr Taue, the young philosophy buff who, I suppose, is no longer simply a young philosophy buff, having been happily promoted this spring from his post as a lecturer to become a fully fledged assistant professor—with the result, as you are aware, that the young scholar’s lofty, spiritual repose does indeed seem to have been pointlessly ruined. My name turned up in tabloid gossip columns, causing you some degree of inconvenience. Earlier I noted the urge that comes upon me as I look at you to give you a vigorous shake; this little incident may, perhaps, have succeeded slightly in that direction; or it may not.

  *

  Carping on about such things will, however, only heighten your displeasure. Better to move on to the main argument.

  I wonder what you think of all this. Looking back, it occurs to me that quite a
long time has passed since we became husband and wife in name only. Does it not strike you that it would be a profound relief to put an end to our relationship? True, it is sad that it has come to this, but in the absence of any substantial objections on your part, I cannot help feeling that it would be best to devise some means of setting both of us, you as well as me, at liberty. How does this sound?

  Now that you will be resigning from active participation in all your business activities—it came as a deep shock, I might add, to learn that your name was on the list of purged businessmen—it seems like the ideal moment, from your perspective, as well, to end this unnatural relationship. Here, briefly, is what I desire: our homes in Takarazuka and Yase. Those two will be sufficient. Lately I have been mulling, presumptuously enough, over the various possibilities open to me, and I have arrived at the conclusion that I would like to live in Yase, as the house there is of a fitting size and the environment is congenial to me, and to support myself for the remainder of my life with funds raised by selling the house in Takarazuka, for which I would ask two million yen or thereabouts. Think of this as one final illustration of my selfishness, and simultaneously as the first and only time I have ever allowed myself, or ever will allow myself, to lean upon you, asking for evidence of your affection.

  The fact that I am making this unexpected proposal should not be taken to indicate that I have at present anything as stylish as a lover, let alone more than one. There is, therefore, no need for you to fret over the possibility that someone might relieve me of the money. Indeed, I regret to say that I have never yet found a potential lover who would not shame me. Seldom does one encounter a man who satisfies even my two most basic requirements: that he tend properly to the hairline on the nape of his neck, keeping it fresh as the cut edge of a lemon; and that the line of his waist be as clean and strong as a serow’s. Sadly, the joy your bride took in her beloved husband a decade ago, when you first made her heart yours, remains to this day sufficiently overpowering. And speaking of serow: I remember a story I once read in a newspaper about a young man found living naked with a flock of those wild goats out in the middle of the Syrian desert. How ravishing he was in that photograph! His cold profile, capped by a tangle of unkempt hair; the powerful allure of his lanky legs, capable, as the paper observed, of running at fifty miles an hour. To this day, the memory of that youth inspires a peculiar surging in my blood, unlike anything I have ever known with another man. It strikes me that the word “intellectual” was invented to describe that face; the word “wild” to describe that form.

  In the eyes of one who has glimpsed such a youth, all other men seem equally common, drearily dull. If at any point your wife ever felt even a few brief sparks of unchaste longing, that was the day—when she was drawn to the goat boy. Thinking of him now, picturing his taut skin moist with desert dew… but no, more than that it is the cool purity of his extraordinary fate that stirs up crazed waves in my heart even after all this time.

  The year before last, I believe it was, there was a period when I became infatuated with a painter in the New Life School, a man by the name of Matsuyo. I would find it rather galling if you were to take as straight fact the rumours that circulated then. I recall that in those days there was a strangely sad gleam in your eyes, verging on pity, when you regarded me. Although I had done nothing to deserve your pity! Even so I was attracted to your eyes then, just a little. You were wonderful, even if you did not quite reach the goat boy’s level. Why, when you had such a marvellous look in your eyes, did you not let them rove a little? Stoicism is not everything, you know. Your gaze remained fixed so steadily on my face that you might as well have been examining a piece of pottery. And so I myself became as crisp and cool as old Kutani ware; I was seized with the desire to go and rest somewhere, absolutely still, and so I went and sat for Matsuyo in his chilly studio. That said, I still greatly admire his architectural vision. He is perhaps somewhat too like Utrillo for his own good, it is true, but one would be hard pressed to find another painter currently active in Japan who is capable of suffusing into paintings of utterly hopeless buildings such a thoroughly modern aura of melancholy, and of doing so, moreover, with such understatement. As a person, though, he was no good. A total failure, in fact. If you stood as the marker for a hundred points, he would have been, at best, a sixty-five. He may have had talent, but there was something nasty about him; his features were well proportioned, but he was sadly lacking in grace. He looked comical rather than thoughtful with his pipe between his lips; he had the face of a second-rate artist whose works had absorbed everything good in him, and only what was good.

  Then last year, in early summer, I believe it was, I showed some affection to Tsumura, the jockey who rode Blue Glory to victory in the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry Cup. This time your eyes shone less with pity than with cold, contemptuous malice. At first I thought it was the leaves outside the windows that made them look so green when we passed in the hall, for example; later on I realized how ridiculously mistaken I had been. It was very sloppy of me, I admit. Had I recognized the true cause, I could have prepared myself mentally to cast back some answering gaze of my own, whether cool or warm! But in those days I was in the throes of a fascination with the beauty of speed that made my whole body go numb; your medieval approach to the demonstration of your feelings could not have been more alien to my sensibilities. I would have liked, at least once, to let you see the pure hunger to win that claimed Tsumura as he clung to the back of that peerless mare, Blue Glory, galloping in a beeline past more than a dozen other horses, one after the next. I know you, too, would have felt your blood rise on catching a momentary glimpse of his earnest, lovable form—I am talking, of course, about Tsumura, not about Blue Glory—through your binoculars.

  When he was only twenty-two, that somewhat unruly-looking youth drove himself against the greatest odds to set two new records, all because he knew I was watching him through my binoculars. Never before had I witnessed such passion. So intent was he on earning my praise that he forgot me altogether once he was astride that dark-brown mare, transfiguring himself into a demon of speed. Yes, I lived then, above all, for the joy of seeing the love I felt up in the stands—it was, indeed, a species of love—be transformed into a passion as limpid as water that he then proceeded to stir, circling around and around that great 2,270-metre oval. I feel not a trace of regret for having given him as a reward three of my diamonds that had survived the war. But that young jockey was lovable only as long as he was perched on Blue Glory’s back; the moment he descended to earth, he was just an imp incapable of appreciating even the flavour of a good cup of coffee. The dauntless, headlong drive to win that he had cultivated astride his horse made it somewhat more thrilling to take him around than that writer Senō or the one-time leftist Mitani, but he had nothing else to offer. This was why, in the end, I took the trouble to introduce him to a dancer I had taken under my wing—the eighteen-year-old with the slightly upturned lip—and even saw them through the wedding.

  I fear my pleasure in chatting with you like this has led me from my topic. What I meant to say is that while I may withdraw to Yase, up there to the north of Kyoto, I am by no means prepared at this point to withdraw from the world. I have no intention whatsoever of going off and devoting myself to religious austerities. I will leave you to light your kilns and fire your tea bowls; I will grow flowers. I am told one can earn quite a lot sending flowers down to market at Shijō. With the old housekeeper and the maid and two young women I have my eye on we should be able to tend 100 or 200 carnations. For the time being, at least, men will be verboten; I have grown a trifle weary of your masculine rooms. I mean that. I am planning out my life in all earnestness, determined this time to make a fresh start, to find genuine happiness.

  You may be surprised by my sudden request that we end our relationship—though, come to think of it, perhaps the opposite is true, and you have been perplexed all along by my failure to make such a request. I myself cannot help bein
g profoundly touched, as I look back, by the fact that I managed to go on living with you for more than a decade. To some extent I have acquired a reputation as a wife of less than impeccable conduct, and I suspect you and I both have left others with the impression that we are an unusual couple; still, we have arrived at this juncture without suffering any social catastrophes, even serving pleasantly together, on occasion, as official go-betweens helping others towards marriage. In this respect, I hope you will agree that I fully merit your praise.

  How extraordinarily difficult it is to write a goodbye letter. It is unpleasant to get all weepy, but it is also unpleasant to be overly brisk. I would like for us to make a clean break and to go our separate ways without hurting each other, but a peculiar sort of posturing seems to have found its way into my prose. Perhaps there is no helping it: a goodbye letter is what it is, and it will not be a thing of beauty, no matter who its author is. I suppose I might as well write in a cold and prickly style appropriate to the content. Forgive me, then, for returning your enduring coldness by writing the sort of unabashedly disagreeable letter that will make you turn still colder.

  *

  It was February 1934, the ninth year of the Shōwa era. I believe it must have been about nine o’clock in the morning when I saw you, dressed in grey Western clothing, walking along the cliff just below my second-floor room at the Atami Hotel. This happened so very, very long ago that it all seems lost in a dream-like haze. There is no need for you to agitate yourself; just listen. How my eyes smarted at the sight of the greyish-blue haori, an enormous thistle woven across its back, that the tall, beautiful woman who came stepping along behind you wore. I had not really expected my intuition to prove so utterly on the mark. In order to confirm it, I had subjected myself to the rocking of the night train, forgoing sleep entirely. To invoke an old conceit, I wished that I were dreaming, and that I would awake. I was twenty years old at the time—the same age as Shōko now. The shock, I must admit, was somewhat too rude for a newly-wed with no sense of what was what in life. I immediately summoned the bell-hop and, faced with his suspicions, invented some excuse and settled the bill; then, unable to remain a moment longer on that spot, I fled outdoors. I stood for a minute on the pavement outside the hotel, holding fast to the searing pain that smouldered in my breast as I briefly debated whether to descend to the shore or go to the station. I started along the road to the ocean, but before I had gone half a block I stopped. I stood staring out at a spot on the wintry ocean where the sunlight glittered against a Prussian blue so perfect it could have been squeezed from a paint tube and smeared across the water; then, changing my mind, I spun on my heel, turning my back on that scenery, and took the other road, the one to the station. Thinking back over the years, it seems that selfsame road has carried me all the way to this point where I stand today. Had I continued down the road to the ocean, towards the two of you, I do not doubt that I would be a different woman now. But for better or for worse, that was not the path I chose. It occurs to me that in all my life, that was the biggest fork.