The shooting of the Box Man Narrator is both a physical attack and a turning point: the wounded man interprets his assailant not simply as an enemy but as another potential box man, only to discover that the attacker is the doctor at the hilltop hospital. The incident draws him toward medical care, where he also meets Toyama Yoko, the nurse who has already directed him there. His account mixes photographed details with openly acknowledged conjecture, making the event a hinge between what he can document and what he can only infer.

Background and Setting

The narrator dates the shooting to an evening about a week or ten days earlier, while acknowledging that a box man’s impaired sense of time makes even such a recent event difficult to place precisely. It occurs beside the mountainside end of the long black wall of a soy sauce factory, where the wall gives way to a slope and a paved road becomes gravel. An old mulberry tree stands near the bend beside a sweet-potato field. The location is not a busy district where the narrator feels at home, but a quiet commercial edge whose apparent straightness and calm he distrusts.

The narrator is beside the road when a sharp sound strikes the box. At first he takes it for a pebble thrown up by a passing vehicle, a familiar possibility from his life near the roadside. No vehicle has passed, however, and pain in his left shoulder makes clear that something else has happened. The sudden change—from an ordinary pause to an attack—also interrupts the narrator’s expectation that he can remain unseen and undisturbed inside the box.

The Shooting and the Photographs

Looking through the box’s small opening, the narrator sees a man near the tree. The man shifts a stick-like object from his shoulder and tucks it under his arm; its reddish-black gleam leads the narrator to identify it as an air rifle. The attacker crosses the road and disappears. The narrator does not call for help or chase him. Still carrying his camera, he turns the box and takes three photographs in succession. He cannot adjust the distance, but notes that the camera settings leave the images more or less in focus.

The photographs give the account an important boundary. The narrator says that the events up to this point can be tested against the film, while what follows lacks objective proof. His testimony therefore offers both an evidentiary claim and a warning: the images may establish the attacker’s presence, but they cannot verify the narrator’s thoughts about the man or the meaning he gives the encounter. This distinction matters because his interpretation begins immediately, before the attacker’s identity is known.

The Narrator’s Interpretation and the Attacker’s Identity

The narrator connects the shooting to what he calls the case of A: people who become absorbed in the idea of being a box man may respond by shooting one. Rather than treating the assailant only as a pursuer, he imagines that the man may be a candidate for box-man life and feels a strange closeness to him. In the narrator’s account, that feeling changes the wound’s meaning: the pain recedes, while he imagines that the attacker will bear a worse inner pain. He decides not to seek further punishment for the man.

That sympathy does not erase fear. Pressing the wound, the narrator finds blood on his fingers and considers the possibility of a territorial contest: the commercial district may not have room for two box men, and an attacker who failed with an air rifle might return with a more dangerous weapon. He recalls other people who have tried to approach him, including someone who addressed him directly in the street. The shooting thus sharpens a conflict built into the box man’s existence: the box offers concealment, but another person who claims the same way of life may turn that concealment into contested territory.

The narrator later says that the photographs identify the rifleman as the hospital doctor. Separate testimony about the doctor’s career supplies context without establishing his motive for the shooting: during the war he served as a medical corpsman, later practiced medicine without a license, and used another doctor’s name and identity. He describes having acquired substantial practical experience and accepting responsibility for his illegal practice, but the available account does not explain why he fired at the narrator. The identity is revealed; the reason remains unresolved.

The Hospital and the Event’s Consequences

A bicycle messenger interrupts the narrator’s thoughts about the deserted road. She tells him that a hospital is at the top of the slope and leaves three thousand yen. The narrator watches her ride away but cannot photograph her. He does not yet know that she is Toyama Yoko, the nurse, just as he does not yet know the attacker is the doctor. He initially keeps the two figures separate in his mind and assumes that her quick departure reflects embarrassment about her charitable act.

The wound worsens by dawn, and the narrator makes his way out of the box to the hospital. There, Toyama Yoko is waiting with a hypodermic needle and the doctor with a scalpel. The convergence of the two people first encountered separately makes the shooting the cause of the narrator’s arrival at the hospital and of his recognition of their identities. Afterward, he wakes in a bed with Toyama Yoko beside him. The relief of being out of the box and her encouraging attention prompt him to promise to buy a box from the box man for fifty thousand yen, though he cannot explain why he makes the promise or what she intends to do with it.

The event therefore changes the narrator’s relation to both danger and intimacy. The air-rifle attack threatens the fragile privacy of box life, but it also brings him into the hospital and into contact with Toyama Yoko. Its narrative force comes from that double movement: the assailant’s identity becomes clearer while his purpose remains obscure, and an act of violence leads to a promise that the narrator himself does not understand.