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The Hunting Gun Yasushi Inoue Books

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The Hunting Gun Yasushi Inoue Books

I have known this book for many years, and own it in a couple of languages other than English. It is one of the most beautiful little books I have ever read, and I was very happy to find it in English and pass it on to people who can appreciate a genuinely poetic, yet totally unsentimental, close-clipped story. I was a little disappointed with the translation (as compared to, say, the German edition) but I'm not sure it could be done much better.


Tags : Amazon.com: The Hunting Gun (9780804802574): Yasushi Inoue: Books,Yasushi Inoue,The Hunting Gun,Tuttle Pub,0804802572,Psychological,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction Psychological,General,Modern fiction

The Hunting Gun Yasushi Inoue Books Reviews

The Hunting Gun won the Akutagawa Prize, the most famous literary award in Japan, in 1950. Literary is the operative word here, for Yasushi Inoue's novella is almost stripped bare of novelistic convention to deliver a very literary experience of existential loneliness and bittersweet sadness.

I won't say anything about what happens since the storyline is so simple and you'll want to encounter it fresh. In any case, this is not storytelling in the Western sense. The aesthetic sensibility of The Hunting Gun is purely Japanese, so much so that I suspect I'm missing some of the many layers of significance.

Inoue takes an approach that feels quite different from character development. We don't know what made this character fall in love with that character. Rather, we witness events and emotions through poetic imagery. A white riverbed. A pattern of bright thistles on a silk coat. Petals frozen in a glass globe. These images are drenched in anguish for the characters and propel the narrative.

The introduction was extremely helpful to me in understanding (somewhat) Inoue's style in The Hunting Gun - and seeing his work in the context of the Japanese literary scene.

I ordered The Hunting Gun after reading Tun-Huang, a wonderful historical novel by Inoue. Tun-Huang's heady mix of adventure, romance, mysticism and exotic characters was more to my taste than the extreme refinement of The Hunting Gun. But whether Inoue's subject is an ancient Chinese mystery or the loneliness of lovers, he's a writer of rare imagination.
I am amazed this little gem is not better known and widely applauded. When I first encountered it, I was struck by the author's mastery of expressing profound saddness, with the deftness of Japanese calligraphy and the balance and economy of a perfect haiku.

It is one of the very few books I have re-read (several times) and I recommend it widely to anyone interested in original writing.
In this short piece, an extramarital love between two married people is shown through the reflection of letters by the man's wife, the woman's daughter and the woman herself. With a succinctness of language rarely found elsewhere, with imagery whose starkness matches the sadness of the story's message, Inoue manages to convey an emotional intensity that can only be described as haunting. There is not a trace of sentimentality in this tale, yet it deals with passion, betrayal and death. The author wastes not a single word This is poetic prose at its best.
The Hunting Gun by Yasushi Inoue unfolds very differently from western novels I have read. Written mainly in epistolary form, the three female letter writers focus on a series of images which express their beliefs and states of mind. The novel deals with love, betrayal and the impossibility of truly knowing another person. A cryptic and beautiful book.
Excellent read---Subtle writing by the author made for a quick, enjoyable book.. Do not ask again for a review as your process much too cumbersome.
What I took out of this book can best be described by Phillip Larkin's "Faith Healing", in which

"In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
In some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps,
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures."
I have known this book for many years, and own it in a couple of languages other than English. It is one of the most beautiful little books I have ever read, and I was very happy to find it in English and pass it on to people who can appreciate a genuinely poetic, yet totally unsentimental, close-clipped story. I was a little disappointed with the translation (as compared to, say, the German edition) but I'm not sure it could be done much better.