The Hunting Gun

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. It came, indeed, as a complete surprise. His tone ever polite and respectful, yet at the same time tightly controlled, possessing the same coldly self-assured air as the handwriting, Misugi Jōsuke explained that he believed he himself was the man I had written about in “The Hunting Gun”, and wondered if his suspicion was correct; that I must have glimpsed his lanky figure, his back, in the village at the foot of the mountain when he visited the hunting grounds on Mount Amagi early in November. His setter, specially trained for pheasant-hunting, white with black spots; the Churchill he had been given by his mentor when he lived in London; even his well-loved pipe had been favoured by my attention. He was honoured, if also somewhat embarrassed, that his distressingly unenlightened state of mind had touched a poetic chord in me, and could only marvel, belatedly, at the remarkable insight that characterizes that special breed of person, the poet. Having read this far, I tried to call up the image he described, to paint in my mind’s eye a fresh portrait of the hunter I had encountered on the narrow, cedar-lined path I had followed one morning five months earlier, in a village known for its hot springs at the foot of Mount Amagi, on the Izu peninsula; but apart from the vaguely solitary air that clung to the hunter’s back, which was what had caught my eye in the first place, nothing came to me. I remembered a tall, middle-aged gentleman, but that was all: certainly not his appearance, or even the sense of his age that I might have gotten from his clothing.

Of course, I hadn’t observed the man with special care. He had simply struck me, as he came along the path with his shotgun over his shoulder and a pipe in his mouth, as having a sort of pensiveness about him that one did not ordinarily see in hunters — an atmosphere that seemed, in the crisp early-winter morning air, so extraordinarily clean that after we had passed each other I couldn’t help turning to look back. He had just stepped off the path onto a road that led through a dense wood up into the mountains, and as I watched him go, treading cautiously, one slow step at a time, taking care that his rubber boots did not slip on the surface of the road, which was fairly steep, something in his figure had suggested the profound loneliness I had described in “The Hunting Gun”. Even I had recognized that his splendid hunting dog was a setter, but in my ignorance of hunting there was no way I could have identified the make of gun he was carrying. I only learnt much later, when I sat down to write my poem and did a little hasty research, that Richards and Churchills were the top hunting guns, and I had decided for my own reasons to furnish the gentleman I was writing about with an expensive English gun; it just happened that the shotgun the real Misugi Jōsuke owned was the same one I had chosen. Thus, having him come forward and introduce himself as the subject of my poem did very little for me: the living, breathing man behind the idea I had formed remained, even now, unknown.

Misugi Jōsuke’s letter continued. “You will no doubt be puzzled by what I am about to explain, coming as it does out of the blue, but I have here three letters that were addressed to me. I intended to burn them, but now, having read your poem and learnt of your existence, I find myself wanting to share them with you. I will send them, along with my sincere apologies for disturbing you, under separate cover; I hope only that should you have a moment to spare you might be so gracious as to peruse them, understanding that I have no other motive in sending them to you than this. I would like for you to understand the ‘desolate, dried-up riverbed’ you glimpsed within me. We humans are, in the end, stupid creatures who cannot help desiring that someone know us as we are. I have never felt such a yearning, but now that I know you are out there, and know of the special interest you have so kindly taken in me, I would like you to know everything. Once you have read the letters, you may destroy all three in my stead. I might add that when you saw me in Izu, it was most likely shortly after these letters came into my possession. My interest in hunting goes back several years, however, to a period when I was not as utterly alone as I am today, when my life, in both its public and its private dimensions, was without major disruption. Already, then, I could not do without the hunting gun on my shoulder. I mention this by way of closing.”

Two days after I read these words, the three letters arrived. Like the first, the envelope they came in bore the name “Misugi Jōsuke, Izu Inn”. The letters had been written to him by three women, and when I read them… no, I will refrain from describing what I felt. I will simply transcribe the three letters below. I might note in conclusion, however, that although I checked various Who’s Whos and social registers and the like, suspecting that this man Misugi must be a prominent member of society, his name did not appear in any of them, suggesting that it was a pseudonym he had adopted for the sake of his communications with me. Finally, I have filled in with the name he chose those of the numerous blacked-out spaces in the letters where the man’s name had obviously once been legible, and I have altered the names of all the other people who appear within them.