The Hunting Gun

Yasushi Inoue’s epistolary novella The Hunting Gun tells the story of a man’s extramarital affair through three letters: one from his daughter, one from his wife, and one from the woman he loved. The man himself is largely unimportant and provides little more than the frame story. Instead, the three female characters take center stage as they describe the complexities and compromises of their lives and emotions.

My favorite character is the man’s wife, a cultured intellectual who always knew her husband was having an affair. One of the primary reasons she stayed in the marriage was her affection for his mistress, who happens to be her beautiful and elegant older cousin Saiko. Once Saiko passes away after a long illness, the wife unapologetically ditches the husband to pursue her art (and, presumably, her younger lovers) in a villa in the mountains. Good for her.

The Hunting Gun was originally published in 1949, but it reads like the literature of the Victorian era. The eloquence of the three women’s letters is striking, as are the emotional contortions employed by the characters to avoid upsetting the status quo. The choices the three women make are almost comically irrational and counterproductive, but I couldn’t help sympathizing with them.

Michael Emmerich’s 2014 translation has an expansive sense of flow that stands in pleasing contrast to the style of earlier translations. Emmerich’s translation reminds me of nothing so much as the fluent but subtle monologues of Jane Austen (albeit with more than a hint of Brontë melodrama). There are other ways to read this classic of Japanese literature, but I’m grateful for the updated translation provided by Pushkin Press’s handsome stand-alone edition.