The Hunting Gun

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IT HAD GROWN QUITE LATE when I finished reading these three letters to Misugi Jōsuke. I took the one he had written to me out of my desk and read it again. I kept running my eyes over and over the vaguely suggestive sentences with which he had concluded: “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.” As I kept reading those words I began, all at once, to sense in his gorgeous handwriting and its peculiar air of abandon a darkness that was almost unendurable. If I were to borrow Saiko’s metaphor, I might describe it as his snake.

I rose slowly to my feet and walked over to the north-facing window of my study, and stood there looking out into the dark March night, the trains on the government line sending out sprays of sparks in the distance. What could those three letters possibly have meant to Misugi? What knowledge could they have held out? None of the facts were new to him. He had long since come to understand the true nature of Midori’s snake, and Saiko’s.

I stood at the window for a long time, letting the cold wind gust against my cheeks. There was in my mental state a suggestion of drunkenness. I rested my hands on the window sill and peered out, as if Misugi’s “desolate, dried-up riverbed” were visible there, into the darkness of the small garden that lay beneath my window, crowded with trees.