Japanese novelist Yasushi Inoue published 50 novels and 150 short stories in his lifetime, though few have been translated into English. Pushkin Press aims to introduce Inoue to a broader audience, first with the Akutagawa Prize-winning The Bullfight and now The Hunting Gun, Inoue's debut novella from 1949.
The story revolves around a tragic love triangle and is narrated by a writer who authored a prose poem called "The Hunting Gun" for a Japanese hunting magazine. The poem describes a lonely gentleman's hike to Mount Amagi; his shotgun "leaves the imprint of its creeping weight on the middle-aged man, on his solitary spirit, on his body, all the while radiating an oddly bloody beauty of a sort you will never see when its sights are trained upon a living thing." Soon after publication, the subject of the poem, Misugi Jōsuke, writes to the narrator to explain his emotional state. Misugi encloses three letters: one from Midori, his silent and resentful wife who knows he's having an affair; one from Saiko, Midori's sister and the woman at the heart of the triangle; and one from Shōko, Saiko's daughter and Misugi's niece, who discovers her mother's infidelity in a diary.
His sorrow and emptiness is exposed in nuanced layers; the shotgun represents the destructive coldness to which the relationships descend and a snake--"each of us has a snake living inside"--represents the secrets threatening to ruin these intertwined lives. The Hunting Gun retains a timeless and universal relevance, reflecting on the delicate balance that truth, love and death play in all human relationships. --Nancy Powell, freelance writer and technical consultant