The Hunting Gun

(Paperback)

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Description

Three letters from three women unfold the story of a love affair and its tragic consequencesA lover, her daughter and an abandoned wife: three women write letters revealing the tragic aftermath of a forbidden love affair. Saiko is beautiful, sophisticated - and disloyal to her cousin and closest friend. Midori, forsaken by her husband, takes a silent vengeance. And Shoko, Saiko's daughter, is left to make sense of family secrets.In this masterpiece of mid-century Japanese fiction, Inoue weaves together conflicting perspectives to tell a single story of love, death, truth and longing.

Reviews

'A modern Japanese master... Inoue's humane and searching world view is there to be explored' - Spectator

'Three intertwined voices, three broken lives and the same bitterness underlie this cruel, cold, destructive and implacable narrative. Inoue writes hand-in-hand with Death, with a finger on the trigger' - Lire

'Such is his empathy at times that he transforms the study of human nature into profound art... [he] never wastes words. He knows how to make the smallest detail speak volumes... outstanding' - Irish Times

'Concise and artful' - Spiegel

'Both of these novellas are delightfully reminiscent of the works of Ryunosuke Akutagawa... Inoue and Akutagawa were both intellectuals who managed to restrain over-intellectualisation in their writings. They wrote compassionately, but without a hint of sentimentality' - (Praise for Bullfight and the Hunting Gun), Times Literary Supplement

Author Bio

YASUSHI INOUE (1907-1991) worked as a journalist and literary editor for many years, beginning his prolific career as an author in 1949 with the novel Bullfight. He went on to publish 50 novels and 150 short stories, both historical and contemporary, becoming one of Japan's major literary figures. In 1976 Inoue was presented with the Order of Culture, the highest honour granted for artistic merit in Japan.