Yasushi Inoue - The Hunting Gun

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.