Hunting Rifle 1961

Misugi [Shin Saburi], the hunter introduced in a snowy prologue, is a company director and art collector who has just married Midori [Mariko Okada], a much younger and inexperienced wife. A flashback takes up the rest of the film, revealing the tangled past behind their quiet, chilly marriage.

Midori [Mariko Okada] inherits a life that feels far from domestic bliss as her older cousin Saiko [Fujiko Yamamoto] has been married for a few years to the successful physician Kadota [Keiji Sada]. One day, a woman named Hamako [Nobuko Otowa] arrives at Saiko’s house with her young child Shoko [Haruko Wanibuchi], claiming to be Kadota’s former mistress and asserting that Shoko is their extramarital daughter. When Hamako dies in an accident shortly after, Saiko adopts Shoko, but she also divorces Kadota, cutting a complicated, private thread through the family.

Saiko visits Midori, leaving a strong impression with her sophistication and education, and in turn, Misugi begins to fall for her. The affair that follows is intensely intimate and clandestine, a potent mixture of danger and longing that reshapes the lives of everyone involved. Misugi is drawn to Saiko’s world, where intellect and culture stand in stark contrast to the quiet, fraying atmosphere of his own marriage.

Saiko feels a heavy guilt for betraying her younger cousin, referring to Misugi and herself as “criminals” and vowing that she will kill herself if Midori ever finds out. > “criminals”

The ripple effects of the affair begin to reach beyond Saiko’s circle. Midori discovers the truth, yet she chooses to respond with a remarkable restraint, all while she herself pursues brief, separate liaisons that keep the couple’s bond from collapsing entirely. As years pass, the distance between Misugi and Midori grows into a cold loneliness that neither can quite erase, even as they stay bound by a shared, aching history.

During a visit to the ailing Saiko, Midori finally confesses that she knows about the affair, and Saiko, who has learned that Kadota has remarried, faces a further shadow: her diary, containing intimate details of all that has happened, must be burned. In a final, devastating act, Saiko dies by poison after asking Shoko to destroy the diary, a request that the child—whose life has grown from such tangled roots—chooses to ignore, reading her mother’s diary instead and lamenting the “sad and terrible world of adults.” > “sad and terrible world of adults”

The film closes with the prologue’s stark, wintry image returning to haunt Misugi, as the cycle of memory and regret repeats in the cold landscape, a haunting reminder of how adults’ choices can cast long shadows over the lives of those who come after.