Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

I kept quiet. I had no special thoughts on the matter, but I could picture the scene. Whenever he tried to start a conversation with Mariye, she would clam up, just mumble a word or two. Once Mariye made up her mind not to speak, trying to reach her was like ladling water onto a parched desert.

Menshiki picked up an ornament from the table, a glossy ceramic snail, and inspected it from a variety of angles. The snail had been one of the very few decorative objects left in the house. Probably a piece of Dresden china. The size of a smallish egg. Purchased long ago, perhaps, by Tomohiko Amada himself. Menshiki gingerly returned the snail to the table. Then he raised his head and looked across at me.

“I guess it will take her a while to get used to me,” he said, as if addressing himself. “I mean, we’ve only just met. She’s a quiet child to begin with, and thirteen is said to be a difficult age, the beginning of puberty. All the same, being with her in the same room, breathing the same air—it was a precious experience, priceless really.”

“So then your feeling hasn’t changed?”

Menshiki’s eyes narrowed slightly. “What feeling do you mean?”

“That you don’t care to know if Mariye is your child.”

“No, that hasn’t changed a bit,” Menshiki said without hesitation. He chewed his lip for a moment before continuing. “It’s hard to explain. But when she’s near, and I look at her face and watch her move, this odd feeling comes over me. The sense that somehow my life up to now may have been wasted. That I no longer understand the purpose of my existence, the reason I’m here. As if values I’d thought were certain were turning out to be not so certain after all.”

“And for you these sorts of feelings are extremely odd, am I right?” For me, they were par for the course.

“That’s right. I’ve never experienced them before.”

“And they started after spending several hours with Mariye?”

“Yes. You must think I’m some kind of idiot.”

I shook my head no. “Not at all. I felt the same way when I hit puberty and met a girl I liked.”

Menshiki gave a small smile. There was something rueful in it. “That’s when the pointlessness of all my accomplishments and successes, and all the money I’ve accumulated, hit me. That I’m no more than an expedient and transitory vehicle meant to pass a set of genes on to someone else. What other function do I serve? Beyond that, I’m just a clod of earth.”

“A clod of earth.” I tried saying the words. They had a strange ring.

“To tell the truth, I was down in the pit when that realization hit me. Remember, that pit we uncovered behind the shrine, underneath the pile of rocks?”

“How could I forget?”

“If you’d felt like it, you could have abandoned me there. Without food and water, my body would have shriveled and returned to the soil. I would have been no more than a clod of earth in the end.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I remained silent.

“It’s enough for me,” Menshiki said, “that the possibility exists that Mariye and I are related by blood. I feel no compulsion to find out if it’s true or not. That mere possibility has sent a beam of light into my life—now I can look at myself in a new way.”

“I think I understand,” I said. “Maybe not every step in your reasoning, but the way you feel. What I don’t get is what you’re expecting from Mariye. In concrete terms.”

“It’s not that I haven’t given that question any thought,” Menshiki said. He looked down at his hands. They were beautiful hands, with long fingers. “People devote a lot of energy to thinking about things. Whether they want to or not. Yet in the end we all just have to wait—only time can tell how events play out. The answers lie ahead.”

I remained quiet. I had no clear idea what he had in mind, and no compelling desire to find out. Were I to know, my position might become even more difficult.

“I’ve heard Mariye is much more forthcoming with you,” Menshiki said after a long pause. “That’s what Shoko said, at least.”

“That’s probably true,” I said cautiously. “We seem to be able to talk quite naturally when we’re in the studio.”

Of course, I didn’t tell him that Mariye had come to visit me from the adjoining mountain through a hidden passageway. That was our secret.

“Do you think it’s because she’s gotten comfortable with you? Or because she feels some personal connection?”

“The girl is fascinated by painting, maybe artistic expression in general,” I explained. “If a painting is involved, there are occasions—not always, mind you—when she’s quite comfortable talking. She’s not a typical child, that’s for sure. When I taught her at the community center, she didn’t speak much to the other kids.”

“So she doesn’t get along with children her own age?”

“Maybe. Her aunt says she doesn’t make many friends at school.”

Menshiki pondered that for a moment.

“She opens up with Shoko to some extent, I guess,” he said.

“So it seems. From what I’ve heard, she’s much closer to her aunt than she is to her father.”

Menshiki merely nodded. His silence seemed charged with implication.

“What sort of man is her father?” I asked him. “Have you checked?”

Menshiki looked to the side and narrowed his eyes. “He was fifteen years older than she was,” he finally said. “By ‘she’ I mean his late wife.”

Of course, “late wife” meant Menshiki’s former lover.

“I don’t know how they got together, or why they married. I have no interest in those things,” he said. “Whatever the case, though, it’s clear he loved his wife dearly. Her death was a terrible shock. They say he was a changed man after that.”

According to Menshiki, the Akikawas were a big landowning family in the area (much as Tomohiko Amada’s family was in Kyushu). Although they had lost nearly half of their property in the land reform that followed World War Two, they retained many assets, enough that the family could get along comfortably on the income they produced. Yoshinobu Akikawa, Mariye’s father, was the first of two children and the only son, so when his father passed away at an early age he became the head of the family. He built a house for himself at the top of the mountain they owned, and set up an office in one of their buildings in Odawara. From that office, he managed the family properties in the city and its environs: several commercial and apartment buildings, and a number of rental houses and lots. He also dabbled in real estate. In other words, while he kept the business going, he made no attempt to broaden its scale. The core of his enterprise consisted of looking after the family’s assets when the need arose.

Yoshinobu married late in life. He was in his mid-forties when he tied the knot, and his daughter (Mariye) was born the following year. Then, six years later, his wife was stung to death. It was early spring, and she had been walking alone through a big plum grove they owned when she was attacked by a swarm of large hornets. Her death hit him hard. To wipe away anything that could remind him of the tragedy, as soon as the funeral was over he hired men to raze the plum trees, and yank their roots from the earth. What was left was a dreary and barren plot of land. It had been a beautiful grove, so its destruction was painful for many. Moreover, for generations those living nearby had been permitted to pick a portion of the abundant fruit to make pickled plums and plum wine. As a result, Yoshinobu Akikawa’s barbaric act of retaliation deprived many local residents of one of the small pleasures they could look forward to each year. Still, it was his mountain, the plum grove was his , and no one could fail to understand his fury—at the hornets and the trees. As a consequence, those complaints were never voiced in public.