Yasushi Inoue - The Hunting Gun

*

Years passed after that without affording us any further opportunity to bring all this to its conclusion. This summer, the blossoms on the crape myrtle were more poisonously red than ever before. I felt a subtle quickening of anticipation, almost a hope, that something unusual might occur…

I visited Saiko for the last time the day before she died. I found myself confronted, then, quite out of the blue, after more than a decade, by what was unmistakably the same greyish-blue haori whose nightmarish image, in the glaring Atami sunlight that morning, had burnt itself onto my retina. The huge purple thistle hovering above the background, its outline sharp, seemed to weigh upon the frail shoulders of the woman, now somewhat emaciated, whom you loved. I commented, as I came into the room and knelt beside her, on how lovely she looked, struggling to calm myself; but then I began to wonder what she could possibly be thinking, wearing this haori in my presence, at this moment, and all at once my blood began to seethe, to course through my body, like boiling water. I felt powerless to restrain myself. Sooner or later, this woman’s transgressions, the fact that she had stolen another woman’s husband, and the humility of that twenty-year-old bride, would have to be dragged out into the courtyard before the magistrate. That moment, it seemed, had arrived. And so I reached down into my heart and brought out the secret I had kept so carefully hidden for more than a decade, and set it softly down before the thistle.

“It brings back memories, doesn’t it?”

She gave a quick, almost inaudible gasp, and turned to face me. I met her eyes with a steady gaze. And I persisted; I did not look away. Because naturally it was she who should avert hers.

“You wore that when you and Misugi went to Atami together, didn’t you? You’ll have to forgive me. I’m afraid I was watching you that day.”

As I had expected, the blood drained visibly from her face, the muscles around her lips twitched in the most ugly manner — I am not just saying this, I truly was struck by her ugliness — as she tried to find something to say, but in the end she could not pronounce a word; she simply lowered her face, and, yes, let her gaze fall, settling on her white hands where they lay crossed on her lap.

The thought bobbed into my consciousness, then, that this was the moment I had been living for all those years, and I relished an exhilaration of the sort one might feel standing in a downpour as the rain washed down across one’s skin. At the same time, in some other region of my heart, I sensed with an indescribable sadness that one of the two possible endings had at last settled into a shape, and was even now moving towards us. I lingered there, wallowing in that emotion, for quite a while. I was fine; I could have sat in that spot until I grew roots. How desperately she must have wanted to disappear, though, that woman! Eventually, for what reason I cannot say, she lifted her waxen face and stared fixedly at me, her eyes very still. I knew then that she would die. Death had sprung, just now, into her body. Otherwise she could never have looked upon me with a gaze so still. The garden clouded over for a moment, then was bright again. Someone had been playing the piano next door, but now, suddenly, the sound broke off.

“Don’t let it worry you, I don’t mind. You can have him!”

I got to my feet, went out to the verandah to retrieve the white roses I had left there when I came, put them in the vase on the bookshelf, adjusted the arrangement; and then, as I gazed down at Saiko where she sat slumped over again, at her wiry neck, it struck me — awful premonition! — that this would most likely be the last time I saw her.

“Please, there’s really no need to fret. I’ve deceived you all these years, too. We’re even.”

Without even meaning to, I chuckled. And all the while, how perfectly she maintained her silence! From start to finish she simply sat there, speaking not a word, so still and quiet it almost seemed she had stopped breathing. The judgement had been handed down. Now she was free to do as she liked, as far as I was concerned.

With that, I strode swiftly out of the room, flicking the hem of my kimono up with movements so crisp and clean even I could feel it.

Midori! For the first time that day, I heard her cry out behind me. But I continued down the hall, around the corner.

“Are you all right, Aunt Midori? You’re terribly pale.”

I realized that the blood had drained from my face only when Shōko, who was coming along the hall with cups of black tea on a tray, drew my attention to the fact.

By now, I am sure, you see why it is impossible for me to remain with you any longer; or rather, why it is impossible for you to remain any longer with me. I have written at great length and said much that is distasteful; now, at last, it seems the final curtain can descend on ten years of painful bargaining. I have said more or less all I wanted to say to you. If possible, I would be grateful if you could reply, giving your consent to our divorce, before your stay in Izu is complete.

*

Come to think of it, I will close with one bit of unusual news. Today, for the first time in years, I went and cleaned your study in the annexe myself, rather than leave it to the maid. I was impressed by how settled it is — a very nice study indeed. The sofa is singularly comfortable, and the Ninsei pot on the bookshelf does much to enhance the atmosphere, like a blaze of flowers in the otherwise muted room. I wrote this letter in your study. The Gauguin does not quite suit the space, and if possible I would like to take it with me and hang it in the house in Yase; I took the liberty of removing it from the wall, hanging the snowy landscape by Vlaminck in its place. I also rotated the clothes in the drawer, setting out three winter suits, each paired with one of my particular favourites among your neckties. Whether or not you will be pleased, I cannot say.

By the time you read this, my darling, I will no longer be among the living. I don’t know what it’s like to die, but I know all my joy, my pain, my suffering will be gone. All my feelings for you, this surge of emotion that keeps coming and coming whenever I think of Shōko, will have vanished from the face of the earth, just like that. There will be nothing left of me — not my body, not my heart.

And yet, hours or maybe days after I’ve died and entered that state, you will read this letter. And it will communicate to you all these feelings I hold within me now, while I live. It will tell you, just as if I myself were talking to you, things about me, my thoughts and feelings, that you never knew before. You’ll listen to my voice as it comes through this letter as if I were still living, and you will be stunned, saddened, angry. You won’t cry. But you will look at me with that terribly sad face of yours, which no one but me knows — I know Midori has never seen it — and tell me how silly I am. I can see your face clearly even now, and hear your voice.

All of which is to say that even after I die, my life will still be waiting here hidden in this letter until it is time for you to read it, and the second you cut the seal and lower your eyes to read its first words, my life will flare up again and burn with all its former vigour, and then for fifteen or twenty minutes, until you read the very last word, my life will flow as it did when I was alive into every limb, every little corner of your body, and fill your heart with various emotions. A posthumous letter is an astonishing thing, don’t you think? I brim right now with the desire to give you something true in the fifteen or twenty minutes of life this letter holds — yes, at least that much. It scares me to be saying this to you at this late date, but it seems to me that while I was alive I never once let you see me as I truly am. Now, writing this, I am the real me. Or rather, this me, the one writing, is the only one that is real. Yes, this is real…