The Hunting Gun Read online

  That was the first occasion you and I were ever able to spend time alone together. You had been dragging me to various spots on the outskirts of Kyoto since morning, and I couldn’t have been more exhausted, mentally and spiritually. I’m sure you must have been worn out too. As we climbed the steep, narrow path up the mountain, you said all kinds of outrageous things. Love is a form of attachment. I’m attached to my tea bowls, and there’s nothing wrong with that, is there? So how can it be wrong for me to be attached to you? And: We’re the only ones, just you and me, who have seen this magnificent foliage, here on Mount Tennō. And we saw it with each other, together. There’s no going back now. You sounded like a spoilt child, trying to wheedle your way into getting what you wanted.

  All day long my heart had been straining, trying not to give in to you, and then suddenly it was as if you had pushed it down, and I relented—all on account of the silly, desperate things you said. The confused pity your reckless, overbearing statements evoked in me crystallized itself within my body—like flowers blooming everywhere inside me—as the joy of a woman in love.

  It amazes me how easy, how simple it was to forgive my own infidelity when I had never succeeded in forgiving my husband, Kadota, for exactly the same failing.

  *

  Let us be wicked, you said. Wicked. You used that word for the first time when we stayed at the Atami Hotel. Do you remember? It was windy out, and the storm shutters on the window facing the ocean kept shaking and rattling all night. When you pushed it open around midnight to try and fix it, there was a fishing boat far out at sea that had caught fire and was burning high, bright red, like a cresset. People might be dying out there, we could see that, and yet the horror of it didn’t touch us—we saw only how beautiful it was. The second you closed the shutter, though, I became uneasy. You opened it again almost right away, but by then the boat must have burnt up, because there wasn’t a speck of light anywhere—just the dim, settled, bleary vastness of the ocean.

  Until that night, I had still been struggling, deep in my heart, to break away from you. But after that night, after we saw the burning boat, an odd fatalism took hold of me. When you suggested we be wicked together, when you asked me to join with you and deceive Midori for the rest of our lives, I replied without a moment’s hesitation that if we were going to be wicked anyway, we might as well be evil. We would trick Midori, yes, but not only her—everyone, the entire world. That night, for the first time since we began having our trysts, I was able to sleep peacefully.

  I felt as if I had glimpsed, in that boat blazing on the water, unbeknownst to anyone, the fate of our hopeless love. Even as I write this, that scene, those flames bright enough to overcome the darkness, rise up before me. What I saw on the ocean that night was without doubt a figure, the perfect figure, of the distress, the fleeting, this-worldly writhing that is a woman’s life.

  *

  There’s no point losing ourselves in such reminiscences, though. These last thirteen years, which began in the moments I have been describing, gave us our share of pain and anguish, but I feel even so that I have been the happiest person in the world. Cradled as I always was by your great love, your caring, I may even have been too happy.

  I looked over my diary earlier today. I couldn’t help being struck by how often the words “death” and “sin” and “love” appeared there, and it made me feel—as if I didn’t know well enough already—how difficult the long years we navigated together have been; and yet, when I held that notebook in my palm and felt its heaviness, it had a happy weight. I may have been tormented by an omnipresent awareness of sin, a constant refrain of SIN SIN SIN, and I lived every day of my life staring down a vision of death, telling myself that I would die if Midori ever found out, I would make my amends to her, when she finally learnt, by dying, but all this merely stands as a measure of how irreplaceable my happiness was.

  *

  But oh, oh, who would ever have suspected that, beside this happy person I have been speaking of—you’ll find this a pretentious figure of speech, darling, but I don’t know how else to express it—there was another, different me. It’s the truth. Another woman lived inside me, of whose existence even I was unaware. Another me you didn’t know, and could never have imagined.

  I remember you told me once that each of us has a snake living inside him. You had gone to see Dr Takeda, in the science department at the university in Kyoto, and I passed the time while you were with him looking one by one at all the different snakes on display in a row of cases tucked away in a corner of a long hallway in that dismal brick building. By the time you came out of Dr Takeda’s office half an hour or so later, the snakes were starting to get to me, and I felt a bit queasy. That was when you told me about the snakes—peering into one of the cases, you joked, “This is you, and this is Midori, and this is me… everybody has one of these inside him; there’s nothing to be afraid of.” Midori’s snake was a small, sepia-coloured one from some southern region; the one you said was mine came from Australia, and while it was small, too, its body was covered all over in white speckles, and its head came to a point, sharp like a drill. I still don’t know what you meant then. I never spoke with you about the snakes again, but somehow what you said stayed lodged in my chest, I remembered it, and every so often, when I was alone, I would wonder about what those snakes inside us were. Perhaps on some occasions they are egotism, and then jealousy, and then at other times destiny.

  I haven’t understood about the snakes, even now, but I know that you were right that day, because there really was a snake living inside me. It revealed itself to me for the first time today. I can’t think of a better way to describe the other self I carried inside me, without knowing.

  *

  It happened this afternoon. Midori dropped by to look in on me, and when she arrived I was wearing that greyish-blue Yūki haori you had had sent up from Mito for me all those years ago—the one that used to be my favourite when I was younger. She seemed taken aback when she walked into the room and saw it, and for a second I thought she might comment on it, but she didn’t, she just sat there without saying anything. I supposed even she was shocked at my admittedly inappropriate choice of clothing, and so, since I was in a somewhat mischievous mood, I intentionally kept silent.

  Suddenly she shot me an oddly icy look. “Isn’t that the haori you wore when you and Misugi went to Atami?” she said. “I was watching you that day, you know.” Her face was terrifyingly ashen, and her tone was so sharp she might as well have been jabbing at me with a short sword.

  At first I failed to grasp the implications of what she had said, but soon the enormity of it hit me. Without really thinking I straightened the front of the kimono and then, as if being more formal was the only appropriate response in this context, I sat up as tall as I could.

  She’s known everything, all these years!

  I felt oddly calm, as if I were gazing at the ocean at dusk from far away, watching the tide come in. So you knew, you knew it all, I thought, feeling an urge, almost, to take her hand in mine and comfort her. The moment whose anticipation had cast me into such terror had at last come, it was happening right now, and yet when I looked around me there wasn’t a trace of fear to be found. There was nothing between us but the quiet lapping of water, like waves on the seashore. The veil behind which we had hidden our secret for thirteen years had been brutally ripped away, but what I saw underneath it was not the death that had obsessed me so, but something I can hardly think how to describe, something like peace, quietness—yes, a peculiar feeling of release. I felt relaxed. It was as if some dark, oppressive weight had been lifted from my shoulders, and in its place I had been asked to carry nothing at all but an oddly moving emptiness. I felt that I had an enormous amount of thinking to do. Not about dark, sorrowful, frightening things, but about something vast and futile, and yet at the same time quiet and fulfilling. I was in a sort of drunken ecstasy, that’s what it was—a feeling of liberation. I sat in a stupor, gazing into
Midori’s eyes, but seeing nothing. My ears heard nothing of what she was saying.

  When I came to, she had just left the room and was scampering down the hall.

  “Midori!” I called. Why, I wonder? I don’t know. Maybe I wanted her to come sit with me some more, for ever. And maybe if she had come back, I would have said to her what I was really thinking, without any posturing: “Please let me be formally united with Misugi.” Or perhaps I would have said the opposite, but with exactly the same feeling: “The time has come for me to return Misugi to you.” I can’t say which of those sentences would have come from my mouth. Midori kept going; she didn’t come back.

  I’ll die if Midori ever learns! A comical daydream. And all that SIN SIN SIN—such vain prickings of conscience. I guess once you’ve sold your soul to the devil, you can only become a devil yourself. Perhaps these last thirteen years I have been deceiving God, deceiving even myself.

  After that I sank into a deep, untroubled sleep. When I awoke Shōko was shaking me, and my joints ached until I could hardly move; it was as if thirteen years of weariness were finally taking their toll. I realized that my uncle from Akashi was sitting by my pillow. You met him once—he’s a contractor, and he had stopped by to see me for just half an hour on his way to Osaka on business. He chatted aimlessly about this and that for a few minutes and then he had to leave. As he was tying his shoes in the entryway, though, he called out, “Kadota got married, by the way.” Kadota… how many years had it been since I had heard that name? He was referring, of course, to my former husband, Kadota Reiichirō. As far as my uncle was concerned he was only sharing a bit of news, but I was stunned.

  “When?” Even I could hear my voice shaking.

  “Last month, or the month before. I hear he built a house in Hyōgo, next to the hospital.”

  “Oh?” It was all I could do to speak this one word.

  After my uncle had left, I made my way slowly down the hall, one step at a time, until all of a sudden I swooned and fell sideways, clinging to one of the posts. Feeling my hands tighten themselves, all on their own, I stood staring out through the glass doors. It was windy, the trees were swaying, yet it was unsettlingly quiet; I felt like I was at an aquarium, peering through the glass at an underwater world.

  “Oh, it’s no good,” I said, unsure myself what I meant.

  Shōko was beside me by then. “What’s no good?”

  “I don’t know, something.”

  Shōko giggled, and I felt her supporting me gently from behind. “Sometimes you say the oddest things! Come, you need to lie down.”

  With Shōko helping me I was able to walk more or less normally as far as my futon, but the second I sat down I felt everything around me crumble to the ground, just like that. I half knelt on the futon, my legs angled to the side, steadying myself with my hand. Overwhelmed as I was, I still struggled to contain myself while Shōko was there, but when she went off to the kitchen the tears began streaming down my cheeks like water wrung from a rag.

  Until that moment, it would never have occurred to me that I’d be so stricken to hear that Kadota had married. I don’t know why I reacted that way. After a time—I don’t know how long it was—I spotted Shōko through the glass doors, burning fallen leaves in the garden. The sun had set by then, and the evening was quieter than any I had ever experienced in my life.

  Ah, she’s burning them already!

  I murmured these words out loud, feeling somehow as if it had been decided all along that things would happen this way, and that I had known it, and then I got up and took my diary from its place at the back of my desk. Shōko was burning leaves in the garden today so she could burn my diary along with them. How could it be otherwise? I took my diary out onto the verandah, sat down on a wicker chair, and spent a little while leafing through it. That notebook, full of columns of “sin” and “death” and “love”. The confessions of a wicked woman. The three words I had gone on carving into those pages for thirteen years had completely lost the sparkling vibrancy that had been in them yesterday; they were ready, now, to join the purplish smoke rising into the sky from the pile of leaves Shōko was burning.

  I made up my mind to die after I’d given my diary to Shōko. In any event, I told myself, the time has come for me to die. Or maybe it would be more accurate to say, in this instance, not that I had made up my mind to die, but that I lacked the energy to live any longer.

  Kadota had been single all those years, ever since our divorce. That was only because he had gone abroad to study and then been shipped off to the south during the war, so he had missed his chance to get married again, but none of that changed the fact that he had never taken another wife. I realize now that in some way I couldn’t perceive, his remaining single had been a tremendous support to me, to the woman I am. You will have to believe me when I say that, while I had occasionally heard bits and pieces of news from relatives in Akashi, I never saw him again after we divorced, or wanted to. For years, his name never even entered my thoughts.

  Night fell. When Shōko and the maid had retired to their rooms, I took one of the photo albums from my bookshelf. This album contained twenty-odd photographs of Kadota and me.

  One day several years ago, Shōko had surprised me by saying, “Look, all the pictures of you and Father are pasted in so your faces overlap!” She hadn’t meant anything by it, but it was true: purely by coincidence, those pictures, taken soon after we were married, had been pasted in on opposite pages, so that we would be face-to-face when the album was shut.

  “Oh, you say such ridiculous things!”

  We said no more about it, but Shōko’s words stuck in my heart, and once a year or so, at the oddest moments, they would pop into my mind. I had left the photographs as they were, though, until now—I never removed them, or replaced them with others. But today I felt that it was time for me to take them out. So I lifted all the photographs of Kadota from the pages and slipped them into Shōko’s red album, so that she would have them to keep, as pictures of her father when he was young.

  *

  This was the other me, then, whose existence even I knew nothing about. In this fashion, this very morning, the Australian snake you once said I had hiding inside me, covered with little white speckles, revealed itself. And I realized, too, come to think of it, that all this time, for thirteen years, that sepia-coloured southern snake of Midori’s had been hiding what it knew. It had swallowed the secret of our being in Atami together with a flick of its red tongue, quick as a ripple of heat in the air, and then acted as if nothing had happened.

  What are these snakes we carry inside us? Egotism, jealousy, destiny… the sum of all these things, I guess, a sort of karma too strong for us to fight. I regret that I will never have the occasion to learn what you meant. At any rate, these snakes inside us are pitiful creatures. I remember coming across the phrase “the sadness of living”, or something close to that, in a book; as I write these words, I feel my heart brushing up against a similar emotion, irredeemably sad and cold. Oh, what is this thing we carry inside us—intolerably unpleasant, yet at the same time unbearably sad!

  Having said this much, though, I realize that I still haven’t shared my true self with you. When I first took up my pen to write this letter, my determination was easily blunted; I kept trying to escape, to run away from the things that scared me.

  The other me, the one I didn’t know about—what a nice excuse that is. I said just now that I noticed the white snake inside me for the first time today. That this was the first time it let me see it.

  I was lying. That is not the truth. I have known about it, I’m sure, for ages.

  *

  Oh, when I recall that night, the night of 6th August, when the entire Hanshin region was transformed into an ocean of flames, I feel as though my heart could burst. Shōko and I spent the night in the air raid shelter you had designed for us, and at one point, when the B-29s returned yet again and plastered the sky overhead with their droning, I found myself sudd
enly plunged into a sense of pointlessness and loneliness so fierce I couldn’t do anything against it. I felt so direly alone I can’t even describe it. Terribly, miserably alone. After a while I couldn’t bear just sitting around any longer, so I got up and stepped outside. And there you were, standing there.

  The whole sky, to the west and the east, looked raw, brilliant red. The flames were moving towards your house, and yet even so you had come running to me, you were standing by the shelter’s entrance. I went back into the shelter with you, and then, the second we were inside, I burst out sobbing. Both Shōko and you assumed an excess of fear had made me hysterical. I was never able to explain to you what I was feeling, not clearly—not then, not later. Forgive me. Even as I basked in the embrace of your great love, a love greater than I deserved, I was wishing I could be like you, coming to check on us in our shelter—that I could have gone and stood outside the shelter at Kadota’s hospital in Hyōgo, with its clean white walls, which I had seen just once from a train window. The desire was so strong my body shook with it, and it took all my energy to hold it in, even as I choked on my tears.

  And yet that wasn’t the first time I noticed this sort of feeling inside me, either. To tell the truth, years earlier, in the building at the university in Kyoto, I was so taken aback when you pointed out the existence of that small, white snake inside me that I couldn’t even move. Your eyes have never scared me more than they did then. I’m sure you didn’t really mean anything when you spoke those words, but I felt as if you had seen straight into my heart, and it made me wince. I had been feeling ill on account of all those snakes, the real ones, but now, all at once, the queasiness vanished. I lifted my eyes slowly to your face, terrified, and as it happened— for some reason, I don’t know why—you were just standing there with an unlit cigarette in your mouth, something you had never done before, gazing off at some point in the distance, a dazed look on your face. Maybe I was just imagining it, but your expression seemed emptier than any I had ever seen you wear. It lasted only a second, though; by the time you turned to look at me, you were your usual, mild self again.