The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue

Author:Yasushi Inoue [Inoue, Yasushi]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782270829
Publisher: Pushkin Press
Published: 2014-04-24T00:00:00+00:00

It was February 1934, the ninth year of the Shōwa era. I believe it must have been about nine o’clock in the morning when I saw you, dressed in grey Western clothing, walking along the cliff just below my second-floor room at the Atami Hotel. This happened so very, very long ago that it all seems lost in a dream-like haze. There is no need for you to agitate yourself; just listen. How my eyes smarted at the sight of the greyish-blue haori, an enormous thistle woven across its back, that the tall, beautiful woman who came stepping along behind you wore. I had not really expected my intuition to prove so utterly on the mark. In order to confirm it, I had subjected myself to the rocking of the night train, forgoing sleep entirely. To invoke an old conceit, I wished that I were dreaming, and that I would awake. I was twenty years old at the time—the same age as Shōko now. The shock, I must admit, was somewhat too rude for a newly-wed with no sense of what was what in life. I immediately summoned the bell-hop and, faced with his suspicions, invented some excuse and settled the bill; then, unable to remain a moment longer on that spot, I fled outdoors. I stood for a minute on the pavement outside the hotel, holding fast to the searing pain that smouldered in my breast as I briefly debated whether to descend to the shore or go to the station. I started along the road to the ocean, but before I had gone half a block I stopped. I stood staring out at a spot on the wintry ocean where the sunlight glittered against a Prussian blue so perfect it could have been squeezed from a paint tube and smeared across the water; then, changing my mind, I spun on my heel, turning my back on that scenery, and took the other road, the one to the station. Thinking back over the years, it seems that selfsame road has carried me all the way to this point where I stand today. Had I continued down the road to the ocean, towards the two of you, I do not doubt that I would be a different woman now. But for better or for worse, that was not the path I chose. It occurs to me that in all my life, that was the biggest fork.

Why didn’t I continue down the road to the shore? For a simple reason. Because I could not banish my acute awareness that in no area could I possibly rival that gorgeous woman five or six years my senior, Saiko, whom I had always called “elder sister”—not in terms of the depth of my experience of life, or my knowledge, or my talents, or my looks, or my gentleness, or the grace with which I held my coffee cup, or in discussions of literature, or in my sensitivity to music, or in the application of my make-up.

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