Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

In truth, I had been harboring some misgivings. Might the painting have been altered by the series of events in which I had played a part? Long Face deleted from the scene, for example, because I had shut the lid? Or the Commendatore killed, not with a sword, but with a carving knife? Yet search as I might, I could find nothing changed. Long Face still poked his grotesque face out of his hole, the raised lid in one hand. His saucer eyes still surveyed the scene. The Commendatore was still impaled on a long sword, blood spewing from his heart. The painting remained a perfectly composed work of art. I admired it for a while, then put the sheet back over it.

I turned to look at the two paintings I was working on. They sat side by side on two easels. One, The Pit in the Woods , was wider than it was tall. The other, A Portrait of Mariye Akikawa , was taller than it was wide. I looked at them carefully. Both were exactly as I had left them. Nothing had been changed. One was finished, while the other awaited a final go-around.

Then I turned The Man with the White Subaru Forester , which had been facing the wall, sat on the floor, and took another good look at it. The man with the white Subaru Forester stared back at me from behind the thick layers of paint, which I had applied with my palette knife in several colors. He had no concrete shape, but I could see him there nonetheless. He was looking straight at me with the piercing eyes of a nocturnal bird of prey, his face empty of expression. He was dead set against the completion of his portrait—the exposure of his true form to the world. Against being hauled from the dark into the light.

But I was determined to reveal who he was. I had to drag him out into full view. However much he might resist. The time might not yet have come. But when it did, I had to be ready to follow through.

I returned to A Portrait of Mariye Akikawa . It was far enough along that I didn’t need Mariye to model for me anymore. Only a series of final, technical operations remained. Then the portrait would be basically done. I thought it might turn out to be my most accomplished work to date. At the very least, it would capture the freshness of that beautiful thirteen-year-old girl. I was confident of that. But I knew I would never take those last steps. By leaving it unfinished I was shielding something within her, even though I didn’t know what that something was. That much was clear.

I needed to look after a few things right away. I had to call Shoko and hear the full story of Mariye’s return. I had to call Yuzu and tell her I wanted to see her to talk things out, as I’d resolved at the bottom of the pit. That it was time for us to meet. Then, of course, I had to talk to Masahiko. To explain how it was that I had vanished suddenly from his father’s room at the nursing home, and tell him where I had been for the three days I was missing and unaccounted for (though what I would say—what was possible to say—escaped me).

Clearly, I couldn’t call any of them now. I had to wait for a more appropriate time. That would come in due course—assuming, that is, that time was behaving normally. I drank a glass of warm milk that I heated on the stove and nibbled some biscuits as I sat and looked out the window. It was pitch black outside. No stars were out. Daybreak was still a while off. It was the time of year when nights were the longest.

How should I pass the time? The proper thing would be to climb back into bed. But I wasn’t at all sleepy. I didn’t feel like reading or working. With nothing better to do, I decided to run a bath. While the bathtub was filling, I lay on my back and stared at the ceiling.

Why had it been necessary to pass through that underground world? To make that trip, I had been forced to kill the Commendatore with my own hands. He had sacrificed his life, and I had been compelled to endure one ordeal after another in a world of darkness. There had to have been a reason. The underground realm was full of unmistakable danger, and real fear. Down there, the most outlandish occurrences weren’t strange at all. By successfully navigating that realm, I seemed to have freed Mariye from somewhere . At least she had returned home safely. As the Commendatore had foretold. But what connected my experiences underground and her safe return? Were they somehow parallel?

Perhaps the river water I had ingested was an important piece of the puzzle. It could have altered something in me. I felt that at an intuitive and physical level, though it made no rational sense. Thanks to that change, I had passed through a tunnel clearly too small for my body. Cheered on by Donna Anna and Komi, I had managed to overcome my deep-rooted claustrophobia. No, Donna Anna and Komi could have been a single entity , Donna Anna at one moment, Komi at the next. Together, perhaps, they had shielded me from the dark powers, and protected Mariye Akikawa at the same time.

But where had Mariye been confined? Had she been confined in the first place? When I had given her penguin charm (though “given” didn’t really cover it) to the faceless man, had I harmed her? Or, conversely, had the charm in some shape or form protected her in the end?

The questions only mounted.

Perhaps I would understand the events of the past few days better once I met Mariye in person. I would have to wait. True, things might be no clearer even after we talked. Mariye might recall nothing. Or she might remember, but (like me) be unwilling to share her story.

At any rate, I had to see her once more in this real world, and have a good long talk. We needed to share our stories about what had happened to us. If at all possible.

But was this the real world?

I looked around. So much was familiar. The breeze through the window carried a familiar smell, the sounds outside were familiar sounds.

Just because it looked like the real world at first glance, however, didn’t mean that was necessarily the case. It might be no more than my assumption. I might well have descended through one hole in Izu and traveled the underworld only to be spit out three days later through the wrong hole in the mountains of Odawara. There was no guarantee that the world I had left and the world I had returned to were one and the same.

I rose from the sofa, stripped off my clothes, and stepped into the bathroom. Once again, I soaped and scrubbed every inch of my body. I thoroughly washed my hair. I brushed my teeth, swabbed my ears with cotton, trimmed my nails. I shaved (though there wasn’t much beard to shave). I put on another set of clean underwear. A freshly ironed white cotton shirt and a pair of khaki pants with a sharp crease. I strove to make myself look as acceptable as I could to the real world. But the night still hadn’t ended. Outside was pitch black. So black I felt morning might never arrive, not for all eternity.

But morning did come. I brewed some fresh coffee and made some buttered toast. The fridge was almost bare. Two eggs, some sour milk, and a few limp vegetables. I made a mental note to go shopping later.

I was washing the coffee cup when it struck me that I hadn’t seen my girlfriend in some time. How long had it been? I couldn’t count the exact number of days without checking my calendar . But I knew quite a while had passed. So many things had been going on—a number of them literally not in this world—that I hadn’t noticed her failure to contact me.

Why was that? She called me at least twice every week. “How’s it going?” she would say. I couldn’t call her, though. She couldn’t give me her cell phone number, and I didn’t use email. When I wanted to see her, I had to wait for her call.

Sure enough, my girlfriend did call around nine that morning, when she was still in the back of my mind.