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RYOJU - Das Jagdgewehr

"A great sailor pipe in mouth,

he can setter dogs run ahead of it,

trudges with high boots on the ground icicle

rises and confined path through the undergrowth

up to the early wintry Amagi Mountain. "

Yasushi Inoue (1907-1991)

- A melancholy miniature -

THE HUNTING RIFLE (1950) is one of my most deeply moving works Yasushis After Inoue. I believe a must in any well-organized Japan-section of local bookshelves. Behind the misleading title is a short but sweet literary treasure, a melancholy love story, told in three letters from three different angles. THE HUNTING RIFLE is in many ways a typical representative of the Japanese novel of the first half of the 20th Century. After the forced termination of the cultural isolation, the Japanese education bourgeoisie overthrew hungry for everything Western, whether in fashion, music, visual arts or literature. In a few decades they were trying to acquire almost in slow motion centuries of European culture. Many Western literary trends reached Japanese so only with considerable delay, so there enjoyed lasting popularity of the epistolary novel, as he was in Europe for a long time again fallen out of fashion (see, eg, The Sorrows of Young Werther , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, 1774). Also striking is the trick used by Japanese authors like the repeated change of perspective, the more time telling the same story from different angles. Another well known example of this is Akutagawa's story in the bushes (1922), one of the templates to Kurosawa's RASHOMON (1950).

led the published poem in a hunting magazine THE HUNTING RIFLE einen Leser, der sich in den wenigen Zeilen in seiner Einsamkeit treffend beschrieben glaubt, dem Autoren 3 Briefe zu senden, 3 Briefe die von einer verzweifelten Liebe berichten. 

Eine junge Frau entdeckt im Nachlass ihrer Mutter ein Tagebuch, das sie nach kurzem Zögern zu lesen beginnt. Völlig überraschend findet sie dort eine Jahrzehnte währende Affäre beschrieben. Dieser Schock lässt das idealisierte Bild der Mutter zerbrechen. In der Vorstellung der Tochter war sie, erst recht nach der Trennung vom Vater, stets eine keusch lebende Heilige, ein A-sexuelles Wesen. Sie ahnte nichts von der schon während der Ehe mit dem Vater beginnenden Liebesbeziehung, die auch nach der Scheidung im Schatten remained hidden remain hidden had to, because the lover was married and did not venture his own emotional weak woman to leave. The tragedy of the unattainable, as in-house and social, emotional and moral barriers outlaw love that leaves a pleasant sadness and the reader regrets that this painful tender delicacy is so soon over.

course balances the act a fine line, constantly threatened by the depths of kitsch. That the novel does not ultimately crashes is due to the sophisticated style Inoue. But this makes THE HUNTING RIFLE with a Japanese factory in every respect. The tendency of Japanese Kultur zu Sentimentalität, Rührseligkeit und Theatralik ist schließlich geradezu legendär. DAS JAGDGEWEHR wurde schon 1954, wie hier nachzulesen, auch ansprechend verfilmt.