A lost treasure of Japanese fiction – pocket-sized but world class

Think haiku, netsuke, moss gardens… Small is beautiful. Japanese art, a scholar of the culture once commented, is great in small things. Pushkin Press has a track record for bringing foreign language works, classic and contemporary, to a British readership, and with this pocket-sized, elegant duo they celebrate a modern Japanese master virtually unknown here.

Yasushi Inoue, one of Japan’s major literary figures, wrote his first novel, The Hunting Gun, in 1949, followed immediately by Bullfight. After 20 years as a journalist and literary editor, he was stepping into fiction. By the time he died in 1997 he had written 50 novels and nearly 200 short stories and novellas. Of all his books, he said, he felt closest to these two.

The Hunting Gun delicately anatomises a love affair, set within the framework of an unrelated event: the publication of a poem in a small, specialist magazine. The poem describes a hunter, glimpsed one winter morning, pipe clamped between his teeth, shotgun on shoulder, a setter lolloping ahead as he trudges on, up a mountain slope. The poet sets him in a landscape of the mind, a ‘desolate, dried-up riverbed’, reflecting the solitude of the human condition.

Belatedly he realises that his sombre poem was inappropriate for a magazine dedicated to the joys of hunting, and he awaits a flood of indignant protests. Just one letter arrives, from a man who claims to recognise himself as the hunter. He wants the poet to read three letters he is forwarding — from his estranged wife, his faithful lover, and her daughter. The letters cover 13 years of secrets and lies, interlocking and overlapping to create a picture of passion, betrayal and loneliness, seen from three viewpoints; each one enriching and subtly altering the others.