The Hunting Gun is a powerful epistolary novella, which skillfully sets up a frame story that highlights the power of fiction and explores the desolation of love. The narrator, a relatively low-celebrity poet, hesitantly and regretfully submits a poem to a hunting magazine. He forgets about it for several months, but then receives a mysterious letter from a man who believes he was the subject of the narrator's poem. He is deeply touched, and shares some intensely personal letters that he received that reveal he had an affair with a dying woman that ruined his marriage and the woman's family. As the letters that the narrator receives are one-sided, so too are the perspectives on Misugi.

The nature of the letters contain some interesting and rather poignant reflections on the pain that an affair can cause. But beyond that, the story shows the subject of a fiction “coming to life” in an extraordinary way, but amazingly still grounded in reality. While the narrator writes a poem, ostensibly about the silhouette of a man he once saw by happenstance, that is meant to represent a possibility, a symbol, or a device to tell a story, the actual man exists. And the reality of who he is may be more interesting and significant than what the narrator imagined. Despite having the limitless tools of imagination at his disposal, the narrator receives real-life letters from this same ostensibly hypothetical man that are greatly more impactful in their meaning and message than the poem. The transformation of idealized subject into real person is fascinating as we see how a portrait of a man, and by extension the meaning we attribute to it, is such a meager glimpse at who is actually within. 

And yet, paradoxically, the power of the word is what inspired Misugi to write the author and send these intensely personal letters. Therefore, there is an inextricable story being told through our fictions and our realities. The two dimensions are intertwined and feeding off each other in such a way that, at a certain point, they can blend seamlessly. This metafictional springboard is what allows Inoue to write this story as a piece of fiction. 

And as far as the novella as a whole, the hunting gun appears ultimately a symbol of protection (against feeling utterly alone), which we learn in the brief coda at the end as we revisit Misugi's words to the narrator. That there is ultimately a meaning to the titular hunting gun establishes Inoue's purpose of demonstrating this relationship between reality and fiction.