Харуки Мураками - Killing Commendatore

No one would climb such a long, steep slope on foot at night on a lark. The road was unlit, and deserted. My house had been plopped down on top of an isolated mountain, with no neighbors close by.

For a moment, I thought it might be the Commendatore. But that didn’t make much sense. I mean, he could come and go whenever he wanted, so why ring the bell?

I unlocked and opened the door without bothering to check who it was. Mariye Akikawa was standing there. She was wearing the same clothes she had worn that afternoon, only now a thin navy-blue down jacket covered her windbreaker. Naturally, it got chillier once the sun was down. She had a Cleveland Indians cap on her head (why Cleveland?) and a large flashlight in her right hand.

“Can I come in?” she asked. There was no “Good evening,” no “Sorry for the surprise visit.”

“Sure,” I said. “Come on in.” That was it. My mental desk drawer wasn’t closing properly yet. That ball of yarn was still jammed in there.

I showed her into the dining room.

“I’m still eating dinner. Mind if I finish?” I said.

She nodded silently. She was free of all the tiresome social graces—they meant nothing to her.

“Want some tea?” I asked.

She nodded again. She took off her down jacket, removed her cap, and straightened her hair. I set the kettle to boil, and put some green tea in a small teapot. I wanted a cup of tea myself.

With her elbows on the table, Mariye watched me polish off the broiled yellowtail, miso soup, and salad as if she had come across something very strange. She could have been sitting on a rock in the jungle, watching a python swallow a baby badger.

“I marinated the yellowtail myself,” I explained, breaking the silence. “It keeps a lot longer that way.”

She didn’t respond. I couldn’t tell if my words had reached her or not. “Immanuel Kant was a man of punctual habits,” I said. “So punctual that people set their clocks by when he passed on his strolls.”

Absolutely meaningless, of course. I just wanted to see how she’d react to something so totally random. If she was really listening or not. Again, no response. The silence around us only deepened further. Immanuel Kant continued strolling through the streets of Königsberg, leading his regulated and taciturn life. His last words were “This is good” ( Es ist gut ). Some people can live like that.

I finished dinner and carried the dishes to the sink. Then I made tea. I returned with the teapot and two cups. Mariye sat there at the table watching me throughout. She was eyeballing me intently—like a historian meticulously checking the footnotes of a text.

“You didn’t come by car, did you?” I asked.

At last she opened her mouth. “I walked,” she said.

“All the way from your house, by yourself?”

“Uh-huh.”

I waited for her to go on. But she didn’t. We sat there across from each other at the table for a while without speaking. I’m pretty good at long silences, though. No accident I’m holed up by myself on top of a mountain.

“There’s a secret passageway,” Mariye said at last. “It’s a long way by car, but not far if you take the passageway.”

“I’ve walked all over this area but I’ve never seen anything like that.”

“You don’t know how to look,” she shot back. “You really have to pay attention to find it. It’s well hidden.”

“You hid it, right?”

She nodded. “I’ve lived here since I was small. The whole mountain is my playground. I know every part of it.”

“So the passageway is really well concealed.”

She gave another firm nod.

“And you used it to come here.”

“Uh-huh.”

I sighed. “Have you had dinner?”

“I ate already.”

“What did you eat?”

“My aunt isn’t a very good cook,” the girl said. Not a real answer to my question—it was clear she wanted to let the matter drop. Maybe she didn’t want to recall what she’d eaten for dinner.

“Does your aunt know you came here by yourself?”

Mariye didn’t reply. Her lips were set in a straight line. I chose to answer my own question.

“Of course she doesn’t. What responsible adult would let a thirteen-year-old girl wander the mountains after dark? Right?”

There followed another period of silence.

“She’s not aware of the passageway?”

Mariye shook her head several times. So her aunt didn’t know.

“And you’re the only one who knows about it?”

Mariye nodded several times.

“In any event,” I said, “given where you live, once you left the passageway you probably went through the woods and past an old shrine to get here. Right?”

Mariye nodded again. “I know that shrine. And I know that someone used a big machine to dig up the pile of rocks behind it.”

“Did you watch?”

Mariye shook her head. “I didn’t see them digging. I was at school that day. But I saw the tracks. The ground was covered with them. Why did you do it?”

“I had reasons.”

“What kind of reasons?”

“If I tried to explain from the beginning it would take too long,” I said. So I didn’t try. The last thing I wanted was for her to find out that Menshiki was involved.

“It was wrong to dig it up like that,” Mariye said, abruptly.

“Why do you say that?”

She gave what looked like a shrug. “You should have just left that place alone. Everyone else did.”

“Everyone else?”

“It’s been there like forever, but no one touched it until now.”

The girl was right, I thought. Perhaps we shouldn’t have touched it. Perhaps we should have behaved like “everyone else” had. It was too late to change that now, though. The stones had been moved, the pit exposed, the Commendatore set free.

“Were you the one who removed the lid?” I asked. “Let me guess: you looked inside, then you replaced the boards and the stones that held them down. Am I right?”

Mariye raised her head and looked me straight in the eye. As if to say: How did you know?

“The rocks on the lid had been rearranged. My visual memory is pretty good, always has been. I could see the difference right away.”

“Wow,” she murmured, impressed.

“But the hole was empty. Nothing but darkness and damp air, right?”

“A ladder was there too.”

“You didn’t climb down it, did you?”

Mariye shook her head vigorously. As if to say: No way!

“And now,” I said, “you’ve come here at this time of night for a particular reason, haven’t you? I mean, this isn’t just a social visit, is it.”

“A social visit?”

“You know, an ‘I happened to be in the neighborhood so I thought I’d stop by’ kind of thing.”

She thought for a moment before shaking her head. “No, it’s not ‘a social visit.’”

“Then what is it?” I asked. “I’m more than happy to have you visit me, but if your aunt or your father found out, it could lead to a bizarre misunderstanding.”

“What kind of misunderstanding?”

“There are all sorts of misunderstandings in this world,” I said. “Some go far beyond what you and I can imagine. In this case, it could make it impossible for me to paint your portrait. That would bother me a lot. Wouldn’t it bother you?”

“My aunt won’t find out,” she said emphatically. “I go to my room after dinner and she never follows me. It’s like an agreement we have. I leave through my window and no one knows. No one’s ever caught on.”

“So you’ve been walking the mountain at night for a long time?”

Mariye nodded.

“Isn’t it scary all by yourself after dark?”

“Other things are a lot scarier.”

“Like what, for example?”