“The ecstatic love of a younger writer for the old writer he will be some day,” writes Nabokov, “is ambition in its most laudable form.” But this love is not necessarily reciprocal. “The older writer in his larger library…has nothing but an impatient shrug for the bungling apprentice of his youth.”
It is fortunate, in the eyes of a younger writer like myself, that not every older master shares Nabokov’s rather ungenerous perspective. Some gaze back on their early work with gentle fondness, as does the Japanese novelist, Yasushi Inoue, whose first two novellas were republished by Pushkin Press in 2013. “As authors mature,” says the eighty-one year old Inoue says his Afterword to these two novellas, “they follow the trajectory charted by their first writings.” The Hunting Gun and Bullfight “carry within them…something fundamental from which I have never been able to break free.”
I am grateful for the approachable introduction to the Japanese master’s vast, intimidating body of work; Inoue published over 150 short stories and fifty novels in his lifetime, many of them lengthy historical sagas. But The Hunting Gun and Bullfight are swift, deft, and profound meditations on isolation and change, subtle guides to accepting both with grace in our modernizing world.
The Hunting Gun presents an epistolary story of a tragic love triangle: the intertwined lives of the hunter Misugi Josuke, his wife Midori, and his lover, Shaiko, who is also Midori’s sister. Both women love Josuke but feel alienated from him; he’s an inaccessible soul with an icy edge. “How maddeningly well you hold your fortress,” writes his wife, Midori, “impenetrable on every front.” For over a decade of their marriage, Josuke has been involved with Shaiko, the beautiful woman Midori calls her “elder sister.” Midori has known of the affair for nearly all of that time, though Shaiko doesn’t know that she knows. She punishes her husband by forming infatuations with other men: the artist, the jockey, the photograph of the “ravishing” goat boy found living naked amongst wild goats in the Syrian desert. Josuke and Midori tolerate each other’s infidelities with uncommunicative civility, uncertain of how much the other really knows. It is a frigid, calculating portrait of marriage, but it has a certain tenderness and a bristling static of hostile attraction. “You cooled,” Midori writes, “with the speed of a red-hot piece of iron plunged into water.”
Even through his lover Shaiko’s eyes, Misugi Josuke remains enigmatic and selfish. “You sounded like a spoilt child, trying to wheedle his way into what he wanted,” Shaiko writes of his initial seduction. It is hard to see exactly what she loves in Josuke, other than that he loves her. Shaiko is separated from her husband; she left him years ago when she discovered he’d impregnated a young woman. Her own hypocrisy in making love to her sister’s husband gnaws at her; she is convinced that she’ll die if Midori ever finds out. Yet she is drawn to Josuke, his alternately passionate intensity and chilly remoteness.
Inoue writes with insight about a certain kind of female longing: the lonesome, slightly masochistic fascination with the unavailable man. There is a parallel relationship in Bullfight. Tsugami is the 37 year-old editor-in-chief of the Osaka New Evening Press, a small upstart publication “for the slightly unsavory intellectual.” He is a shrewd journalist who was appointed as editor-in-chief after a successful run at a larger paper. When the story begins, Tsugami has allowed himself to become seduced by another man’s vision: a three-day bullfighting tournament to be held in a baseball stadium in Osaka. The man who has enchanted him is Tashiro, a country showman from the south with a “naïve optimism” and a simple heartiness that might conceal a sneaky, grasping underside. Where Tashiro is from, in “W,” bullfighting is a long-held tradition. This is not Spanish matador bullfighting, but “sumo style,” two bulls locking horns and trying to push each other from the ring. Spectators may bet on the outcome, and this aspect is what has captured Tsugami’s imagination: “the loudspeakers; the bundles of bills; the rocking, cheering waves of people.” This is the late 1940s, in the wake of Japan’s defeat in WWII and Osaka’s brutal firebombing, and the smell of national revitalization—financial and spiritual—seems to enter Tsugami’s calculations. “In these postwar days, perhaps this was just the sort of thing the Japanese needed if they were going to keep struggling through their lives…tens of thousands of spectators betting on a bullfight in a stadium hemmed in on every side by the ruined city.”
Like Misugi Josuke, Tsugami has built a fortress around himself, a stylish, incalcitrant formality distinct to taciturn Japanese men. Yet something in Tashiro’s optimistic passion has caused Tsugami to look “coldly into his own heart, which was no longer capable of losing itself in anything.” This includes Sakiko, the young woman he’s been seeing. Her husband, a friend of Tsugami’s, had died in the war, and she is still waiting for his bones to come home.
Sakiko believes she can see something vulnerable and boyish in the stiff and manful Tsugami. “‘No one else knows you have this side to you,’ she would say when she was feeling happy. ‘This sneaky, sloppy, unsavory side. No one else, just me.’” Tsugami’s hot-cold, push-pull notion of romance has taken its toll on the lonely, hopeful Sakiko. At certain moments she is unable to tell whether “the emotion that welled in her breast was affection or a wish to see him destroyed.” Her ambivalence echoes Midori’s split regard for Josuke: Midori writes, “either there will come a day when I stand quietly huddled against your chest with eyes closed, or I will plunge that penknife you brought me as a souvenir from Egypt with all my strength into your chest.”
This membrane between love and contempt becomes fuzzier for Sakiko as Tsugami gets increasingly entrenched in the mundane and complicated minutia of planning the bullfight, which his modest newspaper is sponsoring. The costs escalate, and the shady Okabe Yata, an eerily cheerful businessman, insinuates himself into the proceedings against Tsugami’s wishes. Tsugami does not want anyone’s help, but it becomes gradually clear that certain axles must be greased in war-rubbled Japan if you want to move dozens of bulls from W to Osaka and then feed them. Tsugami attempts to cut an honorable line through the bureaucratic red tape and ethical tripwires. But he is driven by an undermining form of pride, blind, stubborn and self-destructive. Like a samurai gone astray, Tsugami charges ahead toward his unredeeming doom. As the quick-paced novella clicks toward its climax, it becomes unbearably evident that Tashiro and Tsugami’s epic plans will not and cannot succeed.
There is much more at stake here than Tsugami’s or the newspaper’s success. Inoue masterfully works an existential crisis into the balance; all of the characters stand to gain or lose their elusive self-worth in the outcome of the tournament. The sumo bullfighting metaphor is perfect: two poor brutes locked together and trying to push the other from some arbitrary ring. The dumb struggle, the pathetic futility, which may stand in for all pigheaded human endeavors—war, most of all.
The Hunting Gun and Bullfight take place at the brink of Japan’s modernity. Still extant are the ancient sense of honor, the laying of one’s life on the line, the formal veneer, the hot springs and inns and temple bells. But it is a country in repair, reconstructing its “burned-out ruins” and “half-destroyed buildings,” recasting its identity toward the slick, tech-savvy, cutting-edge nation of the 21st century. Josuke and Tsugami—old-fashioned, prideful, principled men with hard warrior hearts—are caught in this transition, watching their virile gardens turn to weed.
Inoue evokes this image of decay in his Afterword, looking back over his life’s work from the vantage of age and accomplishment: “I feel a little like I am gazing out at a garden gone to seed.” There is a Zen-like calm and acceptance in this imagery, which Josuke and Tsugami do not quite seem to attain—though they glimpse it through their lone desolation. Triumph in defeat, defeat in triumph: like a zen koan.
The Hunting Gun and Bullfight are two lovely flowers plucked out of Inoue’s overgrown and neglected garden. Graceful and wise, they contain the fundamental seeds of the author’s soul. “This untamed garden is me,” Inoue writes. “No one else but me, all there is to me.”
