[1][2][3] Spanning in time between the mid 1930s and late 1940s, it tells the story of a love affair between a married man and his wife's cousin, recounted through three long letters.

These letters take up the major part of the book, with each woman describing the past events from a different perspective, a technique similar to Akira Kurosawa's 1950 film Rashomon.

Saiko, also devastated about the news that her ex-husband remarried, asks Shoko to burn her diary for her and commits suicide with poison.

[3] The novella's opening poem had previously appeared under the same title and in slightly different form in the October 1948 issue of Shibunka magazine.

[2] The Hunting Gun was translated by Sadamichi Yokō and Sanford Goldstein in 1961 and by George Saito as Shotgun in the 1962 anthology Modern Japanese Short Stories.