Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

  “In Tomohiko Amada’s Killing Commendatore, it is indeed me who is impaled by a sword and dies a pitiful death,” the Commendatore said. “As my friends are well aware. But have I any wounds that you can see? Negative! No wounds at all. It would be a bother for me to traipse around bleeding, and it would certainly annoy my friends as well. What with blood messing up the carpet and furniture and whatnot. So I left out the stab wound. The one who took the killing out of Killing Commendatore, that’s me. Affirmative! If you need a name for me, my friends can call me the Commendatore.”

  The way the Commendatore spoke was odd, but he wasn’t a poor speaker. In fact he was actually pretty talkative. But I still couldn’t get a single word out. Reality and unreality still hadn’t come to a mutual understanding inside me.

  “Perhaps you will put that stick down?” the Commendatore said. “It is not as though we are about to embark upon a duel…”

  I looked at my right hand. It was still clutching Amada’s walking stick tightly. I let it go…The oak stick made a dull clunk as it struck the carpet.

  “It is not like I escaped from the painting,” the Commendatore said, again reading my mind. “Negative! That painting—a fascinating one, by the way—remains intact. The Commendatore is still in the process of being stabbed to death. A huge amount of blood continues to flow from his heart. All I have done is borrow his shape for a while. I need some sort of shape in order to speak with my friends. So for the sake of convenience, I borrowed his form. Is that acceptable to my friends?”

  Still not a peep from me.

  “Not that anybody really cares. Mr. Amada has gone on to a hazy, peaceful world, and the Commendatore is not trademarked. If I had appeared as Mickey Mouse or Pocahontas, the Walt Disney Company would be only too happy to slap me with a huge lawsuit, but if I am the Commendatore, I think we are safe, my friends.”

  The Commendatore’s shoulders shook as he laughed merrily.

  “I would have been okay as a mummy, but if I’d appeared as a mummy all of a sudden in the middle of the night, I am aware that my friends might have been bothered. To see a man all shriveled up like a hunk of beef jerky, ringing a bell in the middle of the night—that would certainly give most people a heart attack.”

  I nodded almost automatically. True enough—a commendatore was much preferable to a mummy. If he’d been a mummy I might really have had a heart attack. But running across Mickey Mouse or Pocahontas ringing a bell in the dark would have been pretty creepy too. A commendatore dressed in Asuka-period costume probably was a better choice.

  “Are you a kind of spirit?” I ventured to ask. My voice was hard and hoarse, like a convalescent’s.

  “An excellent question,” the Commendatore said. He held up a tiny white index finger. “An excellent question indeed, my friends. What am I? I am now, for the time being, the Commendatore. Nothing other than the Commendatore. But this form is but temporary. I do not know what I will be next. What am I to begin with? Or I could say, what are you, my friends? My friends have your own appearance, but what are you to begin with? If you were asked that same question, my friends might indeed be confused, I imagine. It is the same thing with me.”

  “Can you assume any form you like?” I asked.

  “No, it is not that simple. The forms I can take are quite limited. I can’t take any form I want. There is a limit to the wardrobe. I cannot take on a form unless there is a necessity for it. And the form I could choose now was this pint-sized commendatore. I had to be this small because of the way he was painted. But this attire is highly unpleasant to wear, I am afraid.”

  He began squirming around in his white costume.

  “To return to the pressing question that my friends have pondered—am I a spirit? No, it is nothing like that. I am no spirit. I am just an Idea. A spirit is basically supernaturally free, which I am not. I live under all sorts of restrictions.”

  I had plenty of questions. Or rather, I should have had. But for some reason I couldn’t think of a single one. Why did he address me as “my friends”? But that was trivial, not worth asking about. Maybe in the world of an Idea there was no second-person singular.

  “I have so many kinds of detailed limitations,” the Commendatore said. “For instance, I can only take on form for a limited number of hours each day. I prefer the somewhat dubious middle of the night, so mostly shape-shift between one thirty and two thirty a.m. It’s too tiring to do it during the day. When I don’t have form I take it easy, as a formless Idea, here and there. Like the horned owl in the attic. Also, I cannot go where I am not invited. Whereas when my friends opened the pit and took out the bell for me, I was able to enter this house.”

  “So you were stuck at the bottom of the pit all this time?” I asked. My voice had improved, but was still a bit hoarse.

  “I could not say. I do not have memory, in the exact sense of the term. Though my being stuck in the pit is a fact. I was in the pit and could not escape. But it did not feel inconvenient to me, being shut up in there. I could be stuck in a cramped dark hole for tens of thousands of years and not feel any distress. I am grateful to my friends for getting me out of there. Being free is much more interesting than not being free, needless to say. I am also grateful to that Mr. Menshiki. Without his efforts, the hole never would have been opened up.”

  I nodded. “That’s exactly right.”

  “I think I must have sensed it. The possibility that the pit would be exhumed, I mean. And must have thought this: The time has come.”

  “So it was you who began to ring the bell in the middle of the night?”

  “Precisely. And the pit was opened. And Mr. Menshiki very kindly invited me to his dinner party.”

  I nodded again. It was true that Menshiki had invited the Commendatore—though he’d used the word “mummy”—to dinner on Tuesday. Following the example of Don Giovanni’s dinner invitation to the bronze statue of Il Commendatore. To him it was probably a bit of a joke. But this was no longer a joke.

  “I never take any food,” the Commendatore said. “And I do not drink, either. No digestive organs, you see. ’Tis boring if you think about it, since he has gone to the trouble of preparing such a feast. But still I went ahead and accepted. It is not often that an Idea is invited by someone for dinner.”

  These were the Commendatore’s last words that night. He suddenly grew silent and quietly shut both eyes, as if slipping into a meditative state. With his eyes closed, the Commendatore’s features took on a contemplative look. His body, too, was completely still. His whole form began to fade, the outline becoming indistinct. And a few seconds later he totally vanished. Reflexively I glanced at the clock. Two fifteen a.m. Most likely his materialization had reached its time limit.

  I went over to the sofa and touched the spot where the Commendatore had sat. My hand felt nothing. No warmth, no depression. No evidence at all that anyone had sat there. Ideas most likely had no body heat or weight. That figure was a mere image and nothing more. I sat down next to where he’d been, took a deep breath, and rubbed my face hard.

  It felt like it had taken place in a dream. I must have been having a long, very vivid dream. Or maybe this world now was an extension of the dream, one I was shut up inside. But I knew this was no dream. This might not be real, but it wasn’t a dream either. Menshiki and I had released the Commendatore—or an Idea taking the appearance of the Commendatore—from the bottom of that strange pit. And that Commendatore—like the horned owl in the attic—had come to inhabit this house. I had no clue what that meant. Or what it would lead to.

  I stood up, retrieved Tomohiko Amada’s walking stick I’d dropped on the floor, turned off the light in the living room, and returned to my bedroom. It was quiet all around, not a single sound. I took off my cardigan, slipped back into my bed in my pajamas, and lay there thinking about what I should do now. The Commendatore planned to go to Menshiki’s house o
n Tuesday, since Menshiki had invited him to dinner. And what would happen there? The more I thought about it, the more wobbly my brain became, my mind like a dining table with uneven legs.

  But before long I grew overpoweringly sleepy. Like every function of my brain was mobilizing to put me to sleep, to pluck me by force from an incoherent, confused reality. And I couldn’t resist. Before long I fell asleep. Just before I fell asleep, I thought of the horned owl. How was he doing?

  My friends must go to sleep now. It felt like the Commendatore murmured this into my ear.

  But that must have been part of a dream.

  22

  THE INVITATION IS STILL OPEN

  The next day was Monday. When I woke up the digital clock showed 6:35. I sat up in bed, and reviewed the middle-of-the-night happenings in the studio. The bell ringing, the miniature Commendatore, the strange conversation with him. I wanted to believe it was all a dream. I’d had a very long, real dream—that’s all it was. In the light of morning, that’s the only way I could see it. I clearly remembered everything that had taken place, and the more I reviewed each and every detail, the more it felt like something that had happened light-years away from reality.

  But no matter how hard I tried to see it all as a dream, I knew that it wasn’t. This might not have been real, but it wasn’t a dream. I didn’t know what it was, but at any rate it wasn’t a dream. It was something altogether different.

  I got out of bed, removed the washi paper wrapping from Tomohiko Amada’s Killing Commendatore, and carried the painting into the studio. I hung it on the wall, then sat on the stool and studied the painting. Like the Commendatore had said the previous night, nothing about the painting had changed. The Commendatore hadn’t escaped from the painting into this world. Like always, the Commendatore was still there, stabbed in the chest, blood pouring out of his heart as he died. He looked up in the air, his mouth open in a grimace, groaning in agony. His hairstyle, the clothes he wore, the long sword he held, even the strange black shoes, were exactly those of the Commendatore who’d appeared here last night. No, to put it in the correct order—chronologically speaking—naturally last night’s Commendatore had minutely copied the appearance of the Commendatore in the painting.

  It was astounding that the fictional figure that Tomohiko Amada had painted with a Japanese paintbrush and pigment had taken on real form and appeared in reality (or something like reality), moving around under its own willpower in three-dimensional form. But as I stared at the painting, this phenomenon began to seem less and less impossible. That’s how vivid and alive Tomohiko Amada’s rendering was. The longer I looked at the painting, the less clear was the threshold between reality and unreality, flat and solid, substance and image. Like Van Gogh’s mailman, who, the longer you looked, seemed to take on a life of his own. Same with the crows that he painted—nothing but rough black lines, but they really did seem to be soaring through the sky. As I gazed at Killing Commendatore I was struck once again with admiration for Amada’s gift and craftsmanship as an artist. No doubt that the Commendatore (or Idea, I should say) was equally struck by how amazing and powerful the painting was, and that was why he had “borrowed” the appearance of the Commendatore. Like a hermit crab chooses the prettiest and most sturdy shell to live in.

  I studied Killing Commendatore for some ten minutes, then went into the kitchen, brewed coffee, and, while listening to the regular news broadcast on the radio, had a simple breakfast. The news was meaningless. Or what I should say is that almost none of the news those days held any meaning for me. Still, listening to the seven a.m. news each day had become part of my routine. It might be a problem if the world was on the brink of destruction and I was the only person unaware of it.

  I finished breakfast, and after confirming that that earth, despite all its various troubles, was still spinning away, I headed back to the studio, mug in hand. I drew back the curtain to let in some fresh air, then stood before the canvas and went back to work on my painting. Whether the Commendatore’s appearance was real or not, whether he showed up at Menshiki’s dinner or not, all I could do in the meantime was focus on the work at hand.

  I called to mind the figure of the middle-aged man with the white Subaru Forester. On his table in the restaurant had been a car key with the Subaru logo, a heap of toast, scrambled eggs, and sausage on a plate. Ketchup (red) and mustard (yellow) containers sat alongside. Knife and fork were lined up on the table. He’d yet to start eating. Morning light shone on the whole tableau. As I passed him, the man raised his suntanned face and stared at me.

  I know exactly where you’ve been and what you’ve been up to, he was informing me. I recognized that heavy, dispassionate light abiding in his eyes. A light I may have seen somewhere else, though when or where I couldn’t say.

  I was completing that figure and that wordless message in the form of a painting. I started out using a crust of bread as an eraser to get rid of any excess lines from the charcoal framework I’d sketched the day before. After removing all that I could, I again added some lines in black to the black lines that remained. This process took an hour and a half. What emerged on the canvas was (so to speak) a mummified image of the man who drove the white Subaru Forester. The flesh pruned away, the skin dried up like beef jerky, a figure shrunken one whole size. This was depicted through the rough black charcoal lines alone. Just a preliminary sketch, but I could imagine how it linked up with the full painting to come.

  “Nicely done,” the Commendatore said.

  I spun around. The Commendatore was seated on the shelf near the window, facing me, his silhouette distinctly backlit in the morning light. He had on the same ancient white clothes and the same long sword downsized to fit his height. This is no dream. Of course it isn’t, I told myself.

  “I am no dream, I can tell you. Negative. Of course,” the Commendatore said, once again reading my thoughts. “I am closer to wakefulness than dream.”

  I said nothing. From my perch on the stool I gazed at his silhouette.

  “I think I said this last night, but it is pretty exhausting for me to materialize when it is bright out like this,” the Commendatore said. “But I wanted to watch my friends painting just this once. So I took the liberty of observing while you worked. I hope this does not offend you?”

  I had no answer to this either. Whether it offended me or not, how was a real person supposed to reason with an Idea?

  Not waiting for my response (or maybe taking what was in my mind as my response), the Commendatore continued. “You are quite a talented painter. Stroke by stroke, the essence of that man is coming out on that canvas.”

  “Do you know something about him?” I asked, surprised.

  “Affirmative,” the Commendatore said. “Of course I do.”

  “Then could you tell me something about him? What kind of person he is, what work he does, what he’s doing now?”

  “I wonder,” the Commendatore said, slightly inclining his head, a hard look coming over his face. When he made that sort of expression he looked like a goblin. Or like Edward G. Robinson from an old gangster movie. Who knows, maybe the Commendatore had “borrowed” that expression from Edward G. Robinson. That wouldn’t be impossible.

  “There are things in the world my friends are better off not knowing,” the Commendatore said, the Edward G. Robinson look plastered on his face.

  The same thing Masahiko Amada had said the other day, I recalled. There are things people are better off not knowing.

  “In other words, you won’t tell me the things I’m better off not knowing,” I said.

  “Affirmative. Even if you hear it from me, the truth is that my friends already know it.”

  I was silent.

  “As my friends paint that picture, you will be subjectively giving form to what my friends already comprehend. Think of Thelonious Monk. Thelonious Monk did not get those unusual chords as a resul
t of logic or theory. He opened his eyes wide, and scooped those chords out from the darkness of his consciousness. What is important is not creating something out of nothing. What my friends need to do is discover the right thing from what is already there.”

  So he knew about Thelonious Monk.

  “Affirmative! And of course I know Edward whatchamacallit, too,” the Commendatore said, grabbing hold of my thoughts.

  “No matter,” the Commendatore continued. “Ah, there is one thing I must raise at this point, as a matter of courtesy. It is about your lovely girlfriend…Right, the married woman who drives a red car. Apologies, but I have been watching all you have been doing here. What you all enjoy doing in bed after you take off your clothes.”

  I stared at him without a word. What we enjoy doing in bed…To borrow her words for it, what one hesitates to mention.

  “But you really should not mind. My apologies, but an Idea watches everything that happens. I cannot choose what I watch. But there is nothing to worry about, at all. Sex, radio exercise routines, chimney sweeping, it is all the same to me. Nothing that interesting to see. I just watch.”

  “There’s no notion of privacy in the world of an Idea?”

  “Affirmative,” the Commendatore said, rather proudly. “Not a speck of that. So if my friends do not mind, then that is all we need to say. So, are you okay with it?”

  I shook my head slightly again. How about it? Was it possible to focus while having sex if you knew somebody else was watching the whole time? Could you call up a healthy sexual desire if you knew you were being observed?

  “I have a question for you,” I said.

  “I would be happy to answer if I can,” the Commendatore said.

  “Tomorrow, on Tuesday, I’m invited to dinner at Mr. Menshiki’s. And you’re invited as well. Mr. Menshiki used the expression “inviting a mummy,” which actually means you. Since at that point you hadn’t yet appeared as the Commendatore.”