Whether he intended to or not Fuminori Nakamura’s noirish The Gun might give us some insight about those who develop an obsessive fascination with guns. In what could be called “Ode To A Revolver,”
a young man comes across a dead body. This is shocking enough in Tokyo. Worse,
the dead man has been murdered. That is obvious. But what transfixes the young man’s gaze is
not the corpse, but the revolver beside the body.
I really can’t think of anything more timely as we
contemplate all the shootings throughout the U.S., the obscene number (we’re a
world leader) of gun deaths by criminals, by police and by accident. This
cannot help but reflect a national sickness that has become a passionate,
polarizing, political controversy. What
is it with guns and Americans?
Nakamura describes the young man’s fascination with a handgun
as it turns into infatuation and then turn into obsession. If the process is
not overtly sexual, it is certainly sensual.
My hands trembled
slightly with nervousness and I felt my body trembling with a cold sweat. As I pushed it with the ball of my thumb, the
cylinder made a little clink and moved far out to the left, stopping at a point
where I could see clearly inside. There
were four golden bullets loaded in it. Each of the gold bullets was embedded in
the six regularly spaced holes. For a moment I gave myself over to a sense of
bewildering joy that was mingled with excitement and relief. This is as it should be, I thought. The gun would never betray me, it would
satisfy me in every way….”
 |
| Fuminori Nakamura |
The writer paints the story in short strokes, capturing
nuance in simple, short sentences, somehow squeezing out the personal in cold
prose. His story is small in the sense that it is only one person’s strange
world we see; yet universal in the way it characterizes how we might be led
into it.
I’ve written about Nakamura before. He was a finalist for The Los Angeles Times Book Prize. He won the David L. Goodis Award
for Noir Fiction. The Gun, translated by Allison Markin Powell, and his other crime
novels received many Japanese literary awards before they began appearing in
the U.S. More to come, no doubt.
Could this emotionally undeveloped psyche be what drives Americans
to have this dangerous sex toy become a substitute for masculinity.
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