Yasushi Inoue - The Hunting Gun

I PUBLISHED A POEM titled “The Hunting Gun” in the most recent issue of The Hunter’s Friend , a floppy little magazine put out by the Japan Hunters’ Club.

Hearing this one might suppose that I am at least slightly interested in hunting, but in fact, having been raised by a mother with a violent dislike of all forms of killing, I have never so much as held an airgun in my hands. It just so happens that the editor of The Hunter’s Friend is a high-school classmate of mine, and when he heard that even now, at my age, I haven’t outgrown the habit of publishing my somewhat idiosyncratic poems in a privately printed journal some of my poet friends and I put out, he asked if I would contribute a piece to his magazine. Presumably he was only being polite, suggesting this on a whim as a way of making up for our having been out of touch for so long. That’s all it was. Ordinarily I would have demurred without a moment’s hesitation, seeing as the magazine focused so narrowly on a topic with which I had no connection, and because he had stipulated that the poem had to deal in some way with hunting; but as chance would have it I had recently been led to feel a certain poetic interest in hunting guns and their relationship to the solitude of the human condition, and I had just been thinking that I should write something on the topic one day. His magazine seemed like the best possible venue for such a work, so one night late in November, at that time of the year when the air finally starts growing painfully cold, I sat at my desk past midnight composing a sort of prose poem, after my own fashion, which I then mailed the next day to the editorial office of The Hunter’s Friend .

Since this prose poem, “The Hunting Gun”, has some slight bearing on what I am about to write, I might as well copy it out here.

Large pipe clamped between his lips, a setter just ahead, the man trudged up the path towards the summit of Mount Amagi, through early-winter brush, crushing hoar frost beneath his rubber boots. Twenty-five-cartridge belt, umber leather coat, a Churchill double-barrel shotgun resting on his shoulder — what is this creature that he must arm himself so forbiddingly with that life-destroying tool of white-gleaming steel? After we had passed each other on the path, I turned to look at the hunter’s tall back, and for some reason my heart was deeply touched.

Ever since that day, from time to time, I find myself unexpectedly wishing, in a train station in the city, or late at night on a street lined with bars, that I could walk the way he had. Slow, silent, cold… When I see the hunter then, in my mind’s eye, he is not on Mount Amagi, amidst that chilly early-winter landscape; instead, a desolate, dried-up riverbed extends itself, white, behind him. The brightly polished hunting gun 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.

It was only when my friend sent me the issue in which the poem had appeared and I leafed through its pages that I realized how stupid I had been: true, the poem bore the somewhat too predictable title “The Hunting Gun”, but it clearly had no place in the pages of a magazine like this; indeed, it stood in such clear opposition to all the references to “the hunter’s way” and “sportsmanship” and “a healthful hobby” that the page given over to it seemed like a settlement, a special zone completely set off from its surroundings. Needless to say, this poem embodied my sense of the essential nature of the hunting gun, as I had poetically intuited it — at any rate, that had been my intention — and in this regard I saw no need to disparage what I had accomplished; if anything, I was proud. Everything would have been fine if the poem had been published in some different magazine, but this was the bulletin of the Japan Hunters’ Club, a journal whose very mission was to promote hunting as the most salubrious of sports; in such a context, my view of the gun was bound to come across as, to some extent, heretical and unwelcome. Nothing could be done now, of course, but I felt for my friend, realizing how taken aback he must have been when he first held the manuscript in his hand — how reluctant, indeed, to publish it — and my heart ached when I considered the characteristic delicacy he had shown in going ahead and printing it anyway. I half expected that some member of the Hunters’ Club might send me an indignant letter, but my anxieties were misplaced: not even a single postcard of that sort found its way into my mailbox. For better or worse, the nation’s hunters had given my poem the cold shoulder. Or to be precise, in all likelihood they hadn’t even read it. But one day, after perhaps two months had passed and the whole incident had faded from my mind, I received a letter from a man — a stranger to me — by the name of Misugi Jōsuke.

I remember reading some later historian’s description of the calligraphy on an ancient stone tablet on Mount Tai as “recalling the brilliant whiteness of the sun after a storm has passed”. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that this was the impression I received from Misugi’s writing on the large white envelope, fashioned from handmade Japanese paper, as I held it in my hand. That old tablet has long since been lost, and no rubbing has survived, so I have no grounds for imagining the particular grace and style its writing possessed; and yet as I regarded those large, highly accomplished cursive characters, written with such verve that the envelope barely seemed capable of containing them, I came gradually to perceive, beneath their obvious boldness and assertiveness, a sense of emptiness welling from within each character, and I found myself recollecting that historian’s appraisal of the calligraphy on the tablet. I got the impression that, having generously steeped his brush in ink and taken up the envelope in his left hand, Misugi had dashed off the address in a single headlong rush, but I sensed in the lively strokes an odd coldness, a lack of expressiveness, a lack of engagement that had nothing to do with what is often described as a “settled” touch. I sensed in the freedom of the brush, that is to say, an utterly modern ego that refused to wallow blissfully in the act, unmarred by the subtle vulgarity and imperiousness of what is generally considered skilful calligraphy.

At any rate, the letter’s dynamic, imposing air was enough to make it seem somewhat out of place when it turned up in my plain wooden mailbox. Cutting the seal, I found the same expansive, free-wheeling characters, five or six to a column, dashed out across the width of each extra-large sheet of gasenshi. “I write to you as one with a fondness for hunting who not long ago had the opportunity to read your poem ‘The Hunting Gun’ in The Hunter’s Friend. I am by nature an unsophisticated man with no affinity for the refinements of poetry; to be quite frank, this was the first time I had ever read a poem, and the first time, as well, I am sorry to say, that I had encountered your name. Reading ‘The Hunting Gun’, however, I was moved more deeply than by anything else in recent memory.” That, more or less, was how the letter began. As I ran my eyes over these first lines, remembering the prose poem I had all but forgotten until then, it struck me that I had, at last, received the indignant protest I expected some hunter to send — and that it had been written, moreover, by a man of some standing. My heart tensed for a moment, but as I continued reading I realized that the letter’s content was nothing like what I had anticipated.