Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

“But you told me you were through with the business, didn’t you?” he said.

“I changed my mind,” I answered. Why exactly, I didn’t say. He didn’t ask, either.

I wanted to live without thinking about anything for a while, to let my hands move on their own, churning out normal, “commercial” portraits one after the other. In the process, I could gain some financial stability. I didn’t know how long I could keep that up. I couldn’t predict the future. But for the time being, at least, that’s what I wanted. To use my hard-won skills without calling up any complicated thoughts. To avoid getting mixed up with Ideas, or Metaphors, or anything along those lines. To keep a safe distance from the messy private affairs of the wealthy, mysterious man who lived across the valley. Not to be dragged into any more dark tunnels for having brought hidden masterpieces into the light. More than anything, that’s what I desired.

I met Yuzu. We talked over coffee and Perrier at a café not far from her office. Her belly wasn’t as big as I had imagined.

“You’re not planning to marry the father?” I asked her right off the bat.

She shook her head. “No, not at the present time.”

“Why?”

“I just feel that’s for the best.”

“But you plan to have the child, right?”

She gave a little nod. “Of course. Can’t turn back now.”

“Are you living with him?”

“No, I’m not. Since you left I’ve lived alone.”

“How come?”

“For one thing, we’re not divorced yet.”

“But I sent you the divorce papers a while ago, signed and sealed. So I assumed we were already divorced.”

Yuzu was quiet for a moment. “To be honest, I never submitted them,” she said at last. “I couldn’t somehow, so I let them sit. You and I have been legally married all this time. That means the baby will legally be your child, whether we get divorced or not. You won’t bear any responsibility for it, of course.”

I couldn’t grasp what she meant. “But biologically speaking, the baby is his, correct?”

Yuzu looked me in the eye. “It’s not that simple,” she said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“How can I put this? I’m not a hundred percent certain the baby is his.”

Now it was my turn to look her in the eye. “Are you saying you don’t know who got you pregnant?”

She nodded. I don’t know.

“But it’s not what you’re thinking,” she said. “I wasn’t sleeping around. I can only have a sexual relationship with one man at a time. That’s why I stopped sleeping with you. Right?”

I nodded.

“I felt sorry for you, though.”

I nodded again.

“But I was careful to use protection with him. I didn’t want a child. You know how I felt. I was ultra-cautious about those things. And yet I got pregnant, just like that.”

“There can always be slipups, no matter how careful we try to be.”

“Women know when something like that happens,” Yuzu said, shaking her head. “We have a sixth sense that tells us. I don’t think men have it.”

Of course, I didn’t.

“At any rate, you’re planning to have the baby,” I said.

Yuzu nodded.

“But you never wanted one. At least as long as we were together.”

“That’s true,” she said. “I didn’t want one with you. I didn’t want one with anybody.”

“And yet now you’re going to go ahead and bring a child into the world without knowing who the father is. Why didn’t you have an abortion? You could have done so earlier.”

“I thought about it, of course. And part of me wanted one.”

“But you didn’t.”

“This is how I think these days,” Yuzu said. “This is my life, sure, but in the end almost all that happens in it may be decided arbitrarily, quite apart from me. In other words, although I may presume I have free will, in fact I may not be making any of the major decisions that affect me. I’ve come to think my pregnancy is an example of that.”

I listened to her without saying anything.

“I know this sounds fatalistic, but it’s what I have truly come to feel. Honestly and deeply. So then I thought, if that’s how things work, why not have the child and raise it on my own. See it through, and find out what happens. That’s come to seem terribly important.”

“There’s just one thing I need to ask,” I said, diving in.

“What is it?”

“It’s a simple question, one that requires a mere yes or no. I won’t say anything more.”

“No problem. Ask away.”

“Can I return to you—would you take me back?”

Her brow furrowed slightly. She looked me hard in the face for a moment. “Do you mean you wish to live once more as husband and wife?”

“If that’s possible.”

“I’d like that,” she said quietly. There was no hesitation in her voice. “You are still my husband, and your room is as you left it. You can come back anytime you wish.”

“Are you still seeing the other man?” I inquired.

Yuzu quietly shook her head. “No, that’s over.”

“Why?”

“I didn’t want to allow him parental rights—that’s the main reason.”

I said nothing.

“It seems to have come as a great shock to him. Only natural, I guess,” she said. She rubbed her cheeks with her hands.

“But you would allow me?”

She rested her hands on the table and once again looked at me closely.

“You’ve changed a little, haven’t you? Your features, or maybe your expression?”

“I don’t know how I look, but I have learned a few things, I think.”

“I may have learned a few things myself.”

I picked up my cup and drained what was left of my coffee.

“Masahiko’s father just passed away,” I said, “so he’s got a lot to deal with right now. When things have settled down for him, I’ll pack my bags and return to our apartment in Hiroo, probably sometime early in the New Year. Assuming that’s all right with you, of course.”

She studied my face. As if gazing at a landscape she had missed for a very long time. Finally, she reached across the table and gently covered my hand with hers.

“I’d like to give it another try,” she said. “In fact, I’ve been thinking that for a while.”

“I’ve been thinking the same thing,” I said.

“I don’t know if it will work out or not.”

“I don’t know either. But it’s worth a shot.”

“I’m about to have a baby without knowing who the father is. Is that going to be all right with you?”

“I don’t have a problem with that,” I said. “I know you’re going to think I’m crazy, but there’s a possibility that I could be the baby’s father—potentially. That’s my feeling, anyway. I could have somehow gotten you pregnant, mentally, from a distance. As a concept, using a special route.”

“As a concept?”

“That’s one hypothesis.”

Yuzu considered that for a minute. “If that’s true,” she said, “then that’s one heck of a hypothesis.”

“Perhaps nothing can be certain in this world,” I said. “But at least we can believe in something.”

She smiled. That was the end of our conversation that day. She took the subway home, while I climbed into my dusty old Toyota Corolla station wagon and drove back to my home on the mountain.

It was several years after I moved back in with my wife that, on March 11, a huge earthquake devastated northeastern Japan. I sat in front of the television as, one after another, coastal villages and towns from Iwate all the way down to Miyagi were laid to waste before my eyes. That was the very same region I had driven through in my old Peugeot 205. I had encountered the man with the white Subaru Forester in one of those towns. Yet now all I could see were the remains of communities leveled by a tsunami that had fallen on them like some giant beast, leaving nothing in its wake but drowned wreckage. Try as I might, I could find no visible connection to that town . Since I couldn’t remember the name of the place, I had no way of learning how much damage it had suffered, or how it had been changed.