Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

  I checked the license plate. Sure enough, it read “Miyagi Prefecture.” On the rear bumper was a sticker with a picture of a marlin on it. It was the same car, no question. That man had come here. A chill ran down my spine. I decided to search for him. I wanted to see his face one more time. To figure out why I couldn’t finish his portrait. Perhaps I had overlooked something basic about him. First, though, I memorized the license plate number. It might prove useful. Then again, it might be of no use at all.

  I walked around the parking lot, keeping an eye out for someone who resembled him. I checked the observation deck. But the man with the white Subaru Forester was nowhere to be seen. A man of middle age, deeply tanned, with a salt-and-pepper crew cut. On the tall side. When last seen, wearing a battered black leather jacket and a Yonex golf cap. I had whipped off a quick sketch on my memo pad and shown it to the young woman sitting across from me. “You’re really good at drawing!” she had enthused.

  Once I was sure no one matching his description was outside, I looked inside the restaurant. I circled the place, but he was nowhere to be seen. The seats were almost full. Masahiko was back at our table, drinking his coffee. The sandwiches hadn’t shown up yet.

  “Where’d you disappear to?” he asked me.

  “I thought I saw someone I knew. So I went outside to check.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “No. Probably a case of mistaken identity,” I said.

  After that, I kept a close eye on the white Subaru Forester outside. Yet if the man in question did come back, what should I do? Go out and talk to him? Tell him I was sure I had bumped into him twice this past spring in a small coastal town in Miyagi? Is that so? Well, I don’t remember you, he’d probably shoot back.

  Well then, why are you following me? I would ask. What are you talking about? he would reply. Why the hell would I be tailing someone I don’t even know? End of conversation.

  In any event, the driver of the white Subaru Forester never went back to his car. It just sat there in the lot, short and squat, silently awaiting its owner’s return. We finished our sandwiches and coffee, but he still hadn’t shown.

  “We’d better be going,” Masahiko said, glancing at his watch. “We don’t have a whole lot of time.” He picked up his Ray-Bans from the table.

  We stood, paid the bill, and walked out. Then we climbed into the Volvo and drove out of the jammed parking lot. I wanted to wait for the man with the white Subaru Forester to return, but meeting Masahiko’s father had to be my top priority. The Commendatore had driven home that message with absolute clarity: My friends will be invited somewhere. You must not decline that invitation.

  I was left with the fact that the man with the white Subaru Forester had shown up once again. He had known where to find me and had made it clear that he was there. His intent was obvious. His appearance could be no accident. Nor, of course, was the tour bus that had hidden him from view.

  * * *

  —

  To reach the facility where Tomohiko Amada was being cared for, we had to leave the Izu Skyline and drive down a long, winding road. The area had recently been turned into a summer retreat for city folk: we passed stylish coffee shops, fancy inns built to resemble log cabins, stands selling local produce, and small museums aimed at passing tourists. Each time we went around a curve, I gripped the door handle and thought of the man with the white Subaru Forester. Something was blocking me from finishing his portrait. A key element, something that made him who he was, had escaped me. A missing piece of the puzzle, as it were. This was new for me. I always gathered together everything I knew I would need before I started a portrait. In the case of the man with the white Subaru Forester, though, I had not been able to do that. Probably the man himself was standing in my way. He didn’t like having his portrait painted, for whatever reason. In fact, he seemed dead set against it.

  At a certain point, the Volvo turned off the road and passed through a big, open steel gate. The gate was marked only by a very small sign. Someone could easily drive right by if they weren’t paying attention. It appeared to be an institution that didn’t feel compelled to announce its presence to the world. Masahiko stopped at the small guardhouse beside the gate and gave his name and the name of the resident he was visiting to the uniformed security guard on duty. The guard made a phone call to confirm the resident’s identity. Once through the gate, we entered a dense grove of trees. Most were tall evergreens, which cast a chilly shadow. We drove up the freshly paved road to the circle set atop the rise, where cars could be parked. A bed of ornamental cabbages surrounding a circle of bright red flowers sat at the center. The flowers were being tended with care.

  Masahiko drove to the far end of the circle and parked his car in one of the visitor spots. Two other cars had preceded us. A white Honda minivan and a dark blue Audi sedan. Both were sparkling new—between them his Volvo looked like an aged workhorse. Masahiko, however, didn’t seem to mind a bit (his Bananarama cassette tape took clear precedence). Below, the Pacific Ocean gleamed dully in the early-winter sun. A few midsized fishing vessels were plying its waters. A small humped island sat just offshore, and beyond it the Manazuru Peninsula. The hands of my watch pointed to 1:45.

  We got out of the car and walked toward the entrance. The building looked quite new. It was a clean and stylish concrete structure, yet nothing was distinctive about it. Perhaps the architect who designed it lacked imaginative oomph. Or else the client, considering its function, had demanded that the building be as simple and conservative as possible. It was three stories high, and quite square—a structure made up entirely of straight lines. The blueprints could have been drawn up with a single ruler. The ground floor was mainly glass, to create as bright an impression as possible. Jutting out from the front of the building was a large wooden balcony with about a dozen deck chairs, but it was winter, so no one would be sunbathing, however bright and pleasant the day. The cafeteria had glass walls that soared from floor to ceiling. I could see five or six people inside, all well along in years, from the look of them. Two were in wheelchairs. I couldn’t tell what they were doing. Perhaps watching television on the big screen on the wall. They weren’t playing leapfrog, that’s for sure.

  Masahiko walked through the entranceway and up to a young woman stationed at the front desk. She was round-cheeked and friendly, with beautiful long black hair. A name tag was affixed to her dark blue blazer. She seemed to know Masahiko by sight, for the two of them chatted for a few minutes. I stood a short distance away and waited for them to finish. A large vase sat in the entranceway, overflowing with a lavish assortment of fresh flowers, arranged, I assumed, by an ikebana expert. At a certain point, Masahiko signed the guest register with a pen and, consulting his watch, added the precise time. He left the desk and walked over to me, hands in pockets.

  “My father’s condition seems to have stabilized,” he said. “Apparently, he was coughing all morning and very short of breath, so they worried that he was developing pneumonia. But they got his cough under control a short while ago, and now he’s fast asleep.”

  “Is it really okay for me to go in with you?”

  “Of course,” Masahiko said. “You came all this way to see him, didn’t you?”

  He and I took the elevator to the third floor. The corridor there was also simple and conservative. Decoration kept to a bare minimum. The one exception, as if by way of concession, was a row of oil paintings hanging on the long, white wall. All were coastal landscapes. They seemed to be a series by a single artist, who had painted spots along the same stretch of coast from a number of angles. They weren’t especially well done, but at least the artist had been generous in his use of paint, and I could applaud the way his paintings disrupted the strict minimalism of the architecture. The rubber soles of my shoes squeaked ostentatiously on the smooth linoleum floor. A little old white-haired lady in a wheelchair pushed by a male attendant passed u
s in the corridor. She stared straight ahead, her gaze so fixed and rigid it did not even flicker when we went by. As if she was determined not to lose sight of a crucial sign suspended in the air before her.

  Tomohiko Amada was in a big room at the very end of the corridor. The name card on the door had been left blank. Most likely to protect his privacy. He was, after all, famous. The room was the size of a small hotel suite, with a basic set of living room furniture in addition to the bed. A folded wheelchair rested against the bed’s foot. A large southeast-facing window looked out over the Pacific Ocean. It was a magnificent, unobstructed view. A hotel room with a view like that would cost an arm and a leg. No paintings hung on the walls. Just a mirror and a round clock. A medium-sized vase filled with purple cut flowers sat on the table. There was no odor at all. Not of a sick old person, nor of medicine, nor of flowers, nor of sun-drenched curtains. Nothing. That’s what surprised me most—the room’s utter lack of smell. It was so striking I thought something had happened to my nose. How could odor be erased so completely?

  Tomohiko Amada was fast asleep near the window, oblivious to the view outside. He slept on his back facing the ceiling, his eyes tightly shut. Bushy white eyebrows overhung his aged eyelids like a natural canopy. Deep wrinkles furrowed his forehead. His quilt was pulled up to his neck—I couldn’t tell if he was breathing or not. If he was, they were extremely shallow breaths.

  I knew right away that this was the mysterious old man who had visited my studio. I had seen him for only a moment or two in the shifting moonlight, but the shape of his head and his wild, white hair left no doubt: it had been Tomohiko Amada. The fact didn’t surprise me in the least. It had been clear all along.

  “He’s dead to the world,” Masahiko said to me. “We’ll just have to wait for him to wake up. If he wakes up, that is.”

  “All the same, it’s a blessing that he’s sleeping peacefully,” I said. I glanced at the clock on the wall. It said five minutes before two. I suddenly thought of Menshiki. Had he called Shoko Akikawa? Had there been any developments in Mariye’s case? Right now, however, I had to focus on Tomohiko Amada.

  Masahiko and I sat across from each other on matching chairs, sipping the canned coffee we had bought from the vending machine in the corridor, while we waited for Tomohiko Amada to wake up. In the meantime, Masahiko told me a few things about Yuzu. That her pregnancy was progressing nicely. That her due date was sometime in the first half of January. That her handsome boyfriend was thrilled about becoming a father.

  “The only problem—from his perspective, anyway—is that she seems to have no intention of marrying him,” Masahiko said.

  “Huh?” I couldn’t believe what I had just heard. “You mean she plans to be a single mom?”

  “Yuzu intends to have the baby. But she doesn’t want to marry the father, or live with him, or share custody of the child…that seems to be the story. He can’t figure out what’s going on. He assumed they’d be properly married once the divorce was final, but she completely rejected his proposal.”

  I thought about that for a moment. The more I thought, though, the more confused I got.

  “I can’t wrap my head around it,” I said. “Yuzu always said she didn’t want kids. Whenever I said I thought the time was right, she said it was still too early. So why does she want a child so badly now?”

  “Maybe she didn’t plan on a baby, but changed her mind once she got pregnant. Women can do that, you know.”

  “Still, it’ll be tough to look after the child all by herself. Hard to hang on to her job, for one thing. So why not marry him? He is the child’s father, right?”

  “Yeah, he doesn’t understand either. He thought they were getting along just great. And he was happy a child was coming. That’s why he’s so confused. He asked me about it, but I’m stumped too.”

  “Have you talked to Yuzu directly?” I inquired.

  Masahiko frowned. “To tell you the truth, I’m trying hard not to get too sucked in. I like Yuzu, but he’s my colleague at work. And of course you and I have been friends for ages. I’m in a tough spot. The more I become involved, the less I know what to do.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I always enjoyed seeing the two of you together—you seemed like such a happy couple,” Masahiko said, looking perplexed.

  “You said that before.”

  “Yeah, maybe I did,” Masahiko said. “But it’s the truth.”

  After that, we sat there without speaking, looking at the clock on the wall, or the ocean outside the window. Tomohiko Amada lay on his back in a deep sleep, not moving a muscle. He was so still, in fact, that I worried whether he was alive or not. No one else seemed concerned, though, so I figured his stillness was normal.

  Watching him lying there, I tried to imagine how he might have looked as a young exchange student in Vienna. But of course I couldn’t. This was an old man with furrowed skin and white hair, experiencing the slow but steady annihilation of his physical existence. All of us are, without exception, born to die, and now he was face-to-face with that final stage.

  “Aren’t you planning to contact Yuzu?” Masahiko asked me.

  “Not at present, no,” I said, shaking my head.

  “I think it might be a good idea for you two to get together and talk things over. Have a good heart-to-heart, so to speak.”

  “Our formal divorce proceedings were handled through our lawyers. That’s the way Yuzu wanted it. Now she’s about to give birth to another man’s child. Whether she wants to marry him or not is her problem. I’m in no position to say anything about it. So what exactly are the things we should talk over?”

  “Don’t you want to know what’s going on?”

  I shook my head no. “I don’t want to know any more than I have to. It’s not like what took place didn’t hurt.”

  “Of course,” Masahiko said.

  All the same, to be honest there were times I couldn’t tell if I had been hurt or not. Did I really have the right? I wasn’t clear enough about things to know. Of course, people can’t help feeling hurt in certain situations, whether they have the right to or not.

  “The guy is a colleague of mine,” Masahiko said after a pause. “He’s a serious guy, hard worker, good personality.”

  “Yeah, and handsome, too.”

  “True. Women love him. Only natural, I guess. Sure wish they flocked to me like that. But he has this tendency that always left us all shaking our heads.”

  I waited for him to go on.

  “You see, we’ve never been able to figure out why he’s chosen the women he has. I mean, he always has lots of women to pick from, and yet he comes up with these losers. I’m not talking about Yuzu, of course. She’s probably the first good choice he’s made. But the women before her were real disasters. I still can’t figure it out.”

  He shook his head, remembering those women.

  “He almost got married a few years back. They’d printed the invitations, reserved the venue for the ceremony, and were heading off to Fiji or someplace like that for their honeymoon. He’d gotten leave from work, bought the airplane tickets. The bride-to-be wasn’t at all attractive. When he introduced us, I remember being shocked by how homely she was. Of course, you can’t judge a book by its cover, but from what I could see, her personality was nothing special, either. Yet for some reason he was head over heels in love. Anyway, they seemed poorly matched. Everyone who knew them felt that way, though no one said so. Then, just before the wedding, she skipped out. In other words, it was the woman who split. I couldn’t tell if that was good or bad for him, but all the same it blew my mind.”

  “Was there some kind of reason?”

  “Not that I know of. I felt sorry for the guy, so I never asked. But I don’t think he ever understood why she did what she did. I mean she just ran. Couldn’t stand the thought of marrying him. Someth
ing must have bothered her.”

  “So what’s the point of your story?”

  “The point is,” Masahiko said, “it still may be possible for you and Yuzu to get back together. Assuming that’s what you want, of course.”

  “But she’s about to have another man’s child.”

  “Yeah, I can see that might be a problem.”

  We fell silent again.

  * * *

  —

  Tomohiko Amada woke up shortly before three. His body twitched at first. Then he took a deep breath—I could see the quilt over his chest rise and fall. Masahiko stood and went to his father’s bedside. He looked down on his face. The old man’s eyes slowly opened. His bushy white eyebrows quivered in the air.

  Masahiko took a slender glass funnel cup from the bedside table and moistened his father’s lips. He mopped the corners of his mouth with a piece of what looked like gauze. His father wanted more, so he repeated the process several times. He seemed comfortable with the job—it appeared that he had done it many times before. The old man’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down with each swallow. Only when I saw that movement was I sure he was still alive.

  “Father,” Masahiko said, pointing at me. “This is the guy who moved into the Odawara house. He’s a painter who’s working in your studio. He’s a friend of mine from college. He’s not too bright, and his beautiful wife ran out on him, but he’s still a great artist.”

  It wasn’t clear how much Masahiko’s father comprehended. But he slowly turned his head in my direction as if following his son’s finger. His face was blank. He seemed to be looking at something, but that something carried no particular meaning for him. Nevertheless, I thought I could detect a surprisingly clear and lucid light deep within those bleary eyes. That light seemed to be biding its time, waiting for that which might hold real significance. At least that was my impression.

  “I doubt he understands a word I say,” Masahiko said. “But his doctor instructed us to talk to him in a free and natural way, as if he was able to follow. No one knows how much he’s picking up anyway. So I talk to him normally. That’s easier for me too. Now you say something. The way you usually talk.”