Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

  If Komi were with me, I’d tell her everything that had happened, and she’d listen quietly, adding an occasional short question. Even with an incomprehensible, mixed-up story like this, I doubt she’d frown or show any surprise. Her calm, thoughtful expression wouldn’t change. And after I finished, she’d pause, then give me some useful advice. Ever since we were little we’d had that kind of interaction. But I realized now she’d never come to me for advice. As far as I could recall, that had never happened. Why? Maybe she didn’t have any major emotional issues? Or maybe she’d decided asking me for advice wasn’t going to help? Maybe both, or half of each.

  But even if she had been healthy and hadn’t died at twelve, the intimate brother-sister relationship we had shared might not have lasted. Komi might have ended up marrying some boring guy, gone to live in a town far away, been run ragged by everyday life, exhausted by raising children, lost her sparkle, and no longer retained the energy to give me advice. No one could say how our lives would have worked out.

  The problems my wife and I had had might have stemmed from me unconsciously wanting Yuzu to stand in for Komi. That was never my intention, of course, but now that I thought of it, ever since I lost my sister I may have been seeking, somewhere inside me, a substitute partner I could lean on whenever I was struggling. Needless to say, though, Yuzu wasn’t Komi. Their positions, and roles, were vastly different. And so was the history we’d shared.

  As I thought about this, I remembered the visit I’d made to Yuzu’s parents’ home in Kinuta in Setagaya in Tokyo, before we got married.

  Yuzu’s father was the branch manager of a large bank. His son—Yuzu’s older brother—was also a banker, and worked for the same bank. Both were graduates of the elite economics department of Tokyo University. There seemed to be a lot of bankers in her family. I wanted to marry Yuzu (and of course she wanted to marry me, too), and the visit was for me to convey my intentions to her parents. Any way you looked at it, it was hard to call the half-hour interview I had with her father a friendly visit. I was an unknown artist who worked part-time painting portraits and didn’t make what could be called a regular income. A guy with little in the way of future prospects. Not at all the sort of man a top banker like her father would view favorably. I’d anticipated this ahead of time and was dead set on not losing my cool no matter what he said, or how much criticism he heaped upon me. And I was basically the kind of person who could put up with a lot.

  Yet as I listened to her father’s long-winded sermon, a kind of physical revulsion welled up in me, and I lost it. I felt sick, like I was going to throw up. I stood up before he’d finished and said, I’m sorry, but I need to use the bathroom. I knelt down in front of the toilet bowl, trying to vomit up the contents of my stomach. But I couldn’t vomit. Because there was hardly anything in my stomach. Even the gastric juices wouldn’t come out. I took some deep breaths and calmed down. I gargled with water to get rid of the bad taste in my mouth, wiped the sweat from my face with a handkerchief, and went back to the living room.

  “Are you all right?” Yuzu asked, looking concerned. I must have looked awful.

  “A successful marriage is up to the people involved, but I can tell you, this one won’t last long. Four, five years at the most.” These were her father’s parting words to me that day. (I didn’t respond.) His spiteful words stayed with me, a kind of curse that remained for a long time to come.

  * * *

  —

  Her parents never did agree to our marriage, but we went ahead and registered it, and officially became a married couple. By this time, I had very little contact with my own parents. Yuzu and I didn’t have a wedding ceremony. Our friends rented a small place and held a simple party to celebrate, but that was it. (The person who did the most to make that happen was Masahiko, who was always good at taking care of others.) Despite the inauspicious beginning, we were happy. At least for the first few years, we were definitely happy together. For four or five years, we had no problems between us. But then, like a huge cruising ship in the middle of the ocean turning its rudder, there was a gradual change. I still don’t know why. I can’t even pinpoint when things began to move in a different direction. What she hoped for in marriage, and what I was looking for, must have been different, and that gap only grew more pronounced over time. And then, before I knew it, she was seeing another man. In the end our marriage only lasted some six years.

  I imagine that when her father learned that our marriage had failed, he’d chuckled to himself and thought, I told you so. (Though we had stayed together a year or two beyond what he’d predicted.) It must have pleased him no end that Yuzu had left me. After we’d broken up, had Yuzu reconciled with her family? I had no way of knowing, and didn’t really want to know, at that point. This was her business, not mine. But still her father’s curse continued to hang over me. Even now, I sensed the vague weight of its presence. I’d been hurt, more than I cared to admit, and had bled. Like the pierced heart of the Commendatore in Tomohiko Amada’s painting.

  Late afternoon came on, and with it, the early-autumn twilight. The sky turned dark in the twinkling of an eye, the glossy black crows squawking their way across the valley, heading for their roosts. I went out on the terrace, leaned against the railing, and gazed over at Menshiki’s house across the way. Several mercury lights were on in his garden, the whiteness of the house rising up in the dusk. I pictured Menshiki out there every night, searching through his high-powered binoculars for Mariye Akikawa. He’d purchased that white house, almost by force, for the sole purpose of doing that. Spent a huge amount of money, made a great deal of effort, all for an overly large house that didn’t suit his tastes.

  And strangely enough (at least to me it felt strange), I’d begun to feel a closeness to Menshiki, a closeness I’d never felt to anyone before. An affinity—no, a sense of solidarity, really. In a sense, we were very similar—that’s what I thought. The two of us were motivated not by what we had got hold of, or were trying to get, but by what we’d lost, what we did not now have. I can’t say I understood his actions. They were beyond my comprehension. But I could understand what had spurred him on.

  I went to the kitchen, took the single malt that Masahiko had given me, and poured a glass on the rocks. I carried the drink out to the living room sofa and selected a record of a Schubert string quartet from Tomohiko Amada’s collection, and put it on the turntable. A piece titled “Rosamunde.” The same music that had been playing in Menshiki’s study. I listened to the music, occasionally clinking the ice in my glass.

  The Commendatore never showed up that day. Maybe, like the horned owl, he was quietly resting up in the attic. Even Ideas needed some time off. I didn’t do any painting that day, either. I needed some time off as well.

  I raised my glass to the Commendatore.

  27

  EVEN THOUGH YOU REMEMBER EXACTLY WHAT IT LOOKED LIKE

  When my girlfriend came over I told her all about the dinner party at Menshiki’s. Leaving out, of course, any mention of Mariye Akikawa, the high-powered binoculars, and the Commendatore having secretly accompanied me. What I described was the dinner menu, the way the rooms were laid out in the house, the kind of furniture—safe subjects. We were in bed, completely naked, after making love for about a half hour. At first it was hard to relax, knowing that the Commendatore must be observing us, but as we got into it, I forgot all about him. If he wanted to watch, let him.

  Like a rabid sports fan is dying to know how his favorite team scored in the game the night before, my girlfriend panted over every detail of the dishes we had at dinner. I painstakingly went over the details, as far as I could remember them, from the hors d’oeuvres to dessert, from the wine to the coffee. Even the tableware. I’ve always been blessed with great visual recall. If I focus on something, even a trivial thing, I can recall the minutest details, even after time has passed. I could reproduce the special features of every dish th
at was served, as if I were doing a quick sketch. She listened to my descriptions, a spellbound look in her eyes, at times actually gulping back her desire.

  “Sounds amazing,” she said dreamily. “Someday I’d love to have a wonderful meal like that.”

  “To tell the truth, though, I don’t remember much of what it tasted like,” I said.

  “You don’t remember how the food tasted? But you liked it, right?”

  “Yes. It was delicious. That much I remember. But I can’t recall the flavors, can’t explain it in words.”

  “Even though you remember exactly what it looked like?”

  “I could reproduce exactly what it looked like. I’m a painter—it’s what I do. But I can’t explain what went into it. Maybe a writer would be able to describe the flavors.”

  “Weird,” she said. “So even when we do this together, you could paint a painting of it later on, but you wouldn’t be able to reproduce the feeling in words?”

  I gathered my thoughts. “You’re talking about sexual pleasure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm. You may be right. But I think describing the flavor of a dish is harder than describing sexual pleasure.”

  “So what you’re saying,” she said, in a voice as chilly as an early-winter nightfall, “is that the taste of the dishes Mr. Menshiki served you is more exquisite, and deeper, than the sexual pleasure I provide?”

  “That’s not what I’m saying,” I said hurriedly. “It’s not a comparison of the quality of the two, but a question of the degree of difficulty of explaining them. In a technical sense.”

  “All right,” she said. “What I give you isn’t so bad, is it? In a technical sense?”

  “Of course,” I said. “It’s amazing. In a technical sense, and all other senses, so amazing I couldn’t paint it.”

  Truthfully the physical pleasure she provided me left nothing to be desired. Up till then I’d had sexual relationships with a number of women—not so many I could brag about it—but her vagina was more exquisite, more wondrously varied, than any other I’d ever known. And it was a deplorable thing that it had lain there, unused, for so many years. When I told her this, she didn’t look as dissatisfied as you might have thought.

  “Really?”

  “Really.”

  She looked at me, dubiously, then seemed to take me at my word.

  “So, did he show you the garage?” she asked.

  “The garage?”

  “His legendary garage with its four British cars.”

  “No, I didn’t see it,” I said. “It’s such a huge place, and I didn’t get a chance to see the garage.”

  “Hm,” she said. “You didn’t ask him if he really does own a Jaguar XK-E?”

  “No. I didn’t think of it. I mean, I’m not really into cars.”

  “You’re happy with a used Corolla station wagon?”

  “You got it.”

  “I’d love to be able to touch a Jaguar XK-E sometime. It’s such a gorgeous car. I’ve been in love with that car ever since I saw it in a film with Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole when I was a child. Peter O’Toole was driving a bright, shiny Jaguar E. Now what color was it? Yellow, as I recall.”

  Her thoughts drifted to that sports car she’d seen as a young girl, while what came to my mind was that Subaru Forester. The white Subaru parked in the parking lot on the edge of that tiny town along the coast in Miyagi. Not a particularly attractive vehicle. A typical small SUV, a squat little utilitarian machine. I doubt there’d be many people who would unconsciously feel like touching it. Unlike with a Jaguar XK-E.

  “So you didn’t get to see the greenhouse or the gym either?” she asked me. She was talking about Menshiki’s house again.

  “No such luck. Didn’t get to see the greenhouse, the gym, or the laundry room, the maid’s quarters, the kitchen, or the spacious walk-in closet, or the game room with the billiard table. He didn’t show them to me.”

  That evening Menshiki had an important matter he had to talk with me about. He was far too preoccupied to give me a leisurely tour of the house.

  “Does he really have a huge walk-in closet, and a game room with a billiard table?”

  “I don’t know. I’m just guessing. It wouldn’t be strange if he did, though.”

  “He didn’t show you any of the other rooms besides the study?”

  “Yeah. It’s not like I’m interested in interior design. What he showed me were the foyer, the living room, the study, and the dining room.”

  “You didn’t try to spot Bluebeard’s secret chamber?”

  “Didn’t have the chance to. And I wasn’t about to ask Menshiki, ‘By the way, where is the famous Bluebeard’s secret chamber?’ ”

  She shook her head a few times, clicking her tongue in frustration. “I tell you, that’s what’s wrong with men. Don’t you have any curiosity? If it were me, I’d want to see every nook and cranny.”

  “The things men and women are curious about must be different.”

  “It seems like it,” she said, resigned to it. “But that’s okay. I should be happy to have gotten a lot of new info about the interior of Mr. Menshiki’s house.”

  I was getting increasingly uneasy. “Getting information is one thing, but it wouldn’t be good if this got out to others. Through your jungle grapevine…”

  “It’s all right. No need for you to worry about every little thing,” she said cheerily.

  She took my hand and guided it to her clitoris. In this way, our two spheres of curiosity once more significantly overlapped. I still had time before I had to go teach. At that point I thought I heard the bell in the studio faintly ringing, but I was probably just hearing things.

  * * *

  —

  After she drove away in the red Mini just before three, I went into the studio, and picked up the bell from the shelf. I couldn’t see anything different about it. It had just been quietly lying there. I looked around, but the Commendatore was nowhere to be seen.

  I went over to the canvas, sat down on the stool, and gazed at the portrait of the man with the white Subaru Forester that I’d begun. I wanted to consider the direction I should take it in now. But here I made an unexpected discovery.

  The painting was already complete.

  Needless to say, the painting was still unfinished. I had a few ideas I planned to incorporate into it. At this point the painting was nothing more than a rough prototype of the man’s face done with the three colors I’d mixed, the colors riotously slapped on over the rough charcoal sketch. In my eyes, of course, I could detect the ideal form of The Man with the White Subaru Forester. His face was there in the painting in a latent, trompe l’oeil type of way. But this was only visible to me. It was, at this point, only the foundation for a painting. Merely the hint and suggestion of things to come. But that man—the person I had been trying to paint from memory—was already satisfied with his taciturn form presented there. And maybe dead set against his likeness being made any clearer than it was now.

  Don’t you touch anything, the man was saying—or maybe commanding—from the canvas. Don’t you add a single thing more.

  The painting was complete as is, incomplete. The man actually existed, completely, in that inchoate form. A contradiction in terms, but there was no other way to describe it. And that man’s hidden form looked out to me from the canvas as if signaling some hard-and-fast idea. Trying hard to get me to understand something. But I still had no idea what that was. This man is alive, I felt. Actually alive and moving.

  The paint on the picture was still wet, but I took the canvas down from the easel, turned it facing away, and propped it up against the studio wall, careful not to get paint on the wall. It was harder and harder for me to stand seeing the painting. There was something ominous about it—something I shouldn’t know about.

&nb
sp; Hovering around the painting was the air of a fishing port. In that air was a mix of smells—the smell of the tide, of fish scales, of diesel engines, of fishing boats. Flocks of birds were screeching, slowly circling on the strong wind. The black golf cap of a middle-aged man who’d probably never played a round of golf in his life. The darkly tanned face, the stringy nape of the neck, the short-clipped hair mixed with gray. The well-used leather jacket. The clatter of knives and forks in the restaurant—that impersonal sound found at chain restaurants around the world. And the white Subaru Forester quietly parked in the lot out front. The sticker of a marlin on the rear bumper.

  * * *

  —

  “Hit me,” the woman had said in the middle of sex. Her fingernails were digging deep into my back. There was a strong smell of sweat. I did as she asked, smacking her face with an open hand.

  “Not like that. Don’t hold back, hit me harder,” the woman said, shaking her head violently. “Harder, much harder. Really hit me. I don’t care if there’s a bruise. Hard enough so my nose bleeds.”

  I had no desire to hit her. I never had those kind of violent tendencies. Hardly any at all. But she was seriously hoping I would seriously hit her. What she needed was real pain. So I reluctantly hit her again, a little harder this time. Hard enough to leave a red mark on her. Every time I struck her, her flesh squeezed my penis like a vise. Like a starving animal pouncing on some food.

  “Would you choke me a little?” she whispered a little while later. “Use this.”

  The sound seemed to be coming from another realm. She pulled out a white bathrobe belt from under her pillow. She’d had it there, ready to use.

  I refused. I could never do something like that. It was too dangerous. Mess up, and she could die.

  “Just pretend,” she pleaded, gasping. “You don’t need to really choke me, just pretend like you are. Wrap this around my neck and tighten it a little.”