Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

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. Something must have bothered her.”