Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

As far as Menshiki knew, I had been in the pit the whole time I was missing. True, he couldn’t explain how I had gotten inside. Yet he had found me there—that was an indisputable fact. As a result, he never connected Mariye’s disappearance and mine. He could only see the overlap of the two events as some kind of strange coincidence.

Discreetly, I probed to see if he had an inkling that someone had been hiding in his house for four days. But he had seen no telltale signs. He was wholly in the dark. In which case, whoever had been standing outside the closet in the forbidden chamber was most likely not him. But then who had it been?

Although Menshiki called, he no longer came by for visits. Perhaps he no longer needed to hang out now that Shoko was in his grasp. Or maybe he had lost interest in me. Or both. It didn’t matter to me one way or the other (though there were times I missed the sound of his Jaguar V8 purring up the slope).

Nevertheless, the occasional phone calls (always before eight in the evening) suggested that Menshiki felt we should stay connected in some way. Perhaps the fact that he had revealed to me that he might be Mariye’s biological father weighed on his mind to some extent. I don’t think he worried that I would blurt it out—to either Mariye or Shoko Akikawa—somewhere down the line. He was sure I would guard his secret. He could read me well enough to know that, like he could read all people. Yet it was so foreign to Menshiki to have bared his heart to anyone, whoever they might be. He had an iron will, but maybe even he found it exhausting to keep secrets to himself all the time. He must have really needed me on his side when he made his confession. And I had struck him as relatively harmless.

Whether or not he had exploited me from the beginning, however, I still owed him my gratitude. It was he who had rescued me from the pit. Had he not come along, if he hadn’t lowered the ladder and then yanked me up to the surface, I would have become a dried-up corpse. In a sense, then, Menshiki and I had each placed our lives in the other’s hands. That meant that our accounts were even.

Menshiki just nodded when I told him that I had given A Portrait of Mariye Akikawa to Mariye in its unfinished state. I guess he no longer needed the painting that much, though he had commissioned it. Or he saw no meaning in an unfinished work. Or his mind was on other things.

A few days after Menshiki and I had this conversation, I put a simple frame on The Pit in the Woods , placed the painting in the trunk of my Corolla, and took it to his house. This was the last time we would meet face-to-face.

“This is for saving my life. Please accept it,” I said.

He seemed to like the painting a lot. (I thought it was pretty good myself.) He offered to pay me for it, but I turned him down. I had received too much money from him as it stood. There was no need for further obligations on either side. We had become neighbors who lived across the valley from each other, no more, and I wanted to keep it that way.

Tomohiko Amada passed away the Saturday of the week I was rescued from the pit. He had been in a coma for three days, and in the end his heart simply stopped beating. It shut down quietly and naturally, like a locomotive pulling into the last station. Masahiko was by his side throughout. He called me soon after.

“He went peacefully,” he said. “That’s the way I would like to go. I thought I could even detect a smile.”

“A smile?” I asked.

“Maybe it wasn’t a true smile, strictly speaking. But that’s the way it looked. To me, anyway.”

“I’m very sorry about your father,” I said, choosing my words, “but I’m glad he went peacefully.”

“He was semiconscious until midweek, but he didn’t seem to want to leave any parting words,” Masahiko said. “I guess he had no regrets—he lived his ninety years to the fullest, doing what he wanted to do.”

You’re wrong, I thought. He had regrets. In fact, he bore a very heavy burden. Yet only he knew what that burden was. Now there was no one left who knew, and it would remain like that forever.

“I’m afraid I’ll be out of touch for a while,” Masahiko said. “Dad was famous in his own way, which means I have to take care of all kinds of things. I’m the son and heir, so I can’t say no. Let’s get together and talk after things have settled down a little.”

I thanked him for taking the trouble to let me know, and we hung up.

Tomohiko Amada’s death cast an even deeper hush over my home. But that was only natural. He had lived there for a long time, after all. I shared the house with that silence for several days. It was intense, but not unpleasant. You could call it a pure silence, in that it was not connected to anything else. A chain of events had come to an end. That’s how it felt, anyway. It was the kind of hush that comes when matters of major importance are finally resolved.

One night about two weeks after Tomohiko Amada’s death, Mariye came to talk to me, stealing to my house in secret like a cautious cat. She didn’t stay very long. Her family was keeping close watch on her, so she didn’t have the freedom to come and go that she had enjoyed before.

“My breasts seem to be getting bigger,” she said. “My aunt and I went shopping for a bra. The stores carry something called a ‘beginner’s bra.’ Did you know that?”

No, I said, I didn’t. I glanced at her chest but saw nothing new beneath her green Shetland sweater.

“I don’t see much difference,” I said.

“That’s because the padding is thin. If it were any thicker, people would see the change right away and think you stuffed something inside. So you start thin and then work up from there. It’s more complicated than I thought.”

Mariye told me that a female police officer had questioned her at length about where she had been those four days. The questioning had been gentle most of the time, yet on occasion the woman had become very firm. But Mariye had stuck with her story: she could remember only that she’d been roaming the mountain and had gotten lost. The rest was a complete blank. She thought she’d survived on the mineral water and chocolate she always carried in her schoolbag. That was all she would say. Otherwise, she kept her mouth clamped shut. She was good at keeping quiet. Once the police were sure that she had not been kidnapped and held for ransom, they took her to a hospital to have her cuts and bruises examined. They wanted to know if she had been sexually abused in any way. When it was clear that no abuse had taken place, the police lost interest. She was just another runaway kid who had gone missing for a couple of days. Hardly a rare occurrence.

Mariye threw away everything she had been wearing during that time: her dark blue blazer, checked skirt, white blouse, knitted vest, loafers—everything. She bought a whole new set of school clothes to replace them. She wanted to start fresh. Then she went back to her life as if nothing had happened. The only difference was that she quit attending the painting class (she was too old for the children’s class anyway). She hung my (unfinished) portrait of her on her wall.

It was hard to imagine what kind of woman she would grow up to be. Girls of that age can change in the blink of an eye, physically and emotionally. I might not even be able to recognize her in a few years. I was thus very happy to have painted her picture (unfinished though it was) as she was at thirteen, freezing her image in time. In this real world of ours, after all, nothing remains the same forever.

I called my former agent in Tokyo and told him I wanted to go back to portrait painting. He couldn’t have been happier. They were always short of skilled artists.