Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

There was only a void, and how are you supposed to give form to something that does not exist?

When people photograph an object, they often put a pack of cigarettes next to it to give the viewer a sense of the object’s actual size, but the pack of cigarettes next to the images in my memory expanded and contracted, depending on my mood at the time. Like the objects and events in constant flux, or perhaps in opposition to them, what should have been a fixed yardstick inside the framework of my memory seemed instead to be in perpetual motion.

Look deep enough into any person and you will find something shining within.

I wasn’t young anymore, and something—like a flame burning inside me—was steadily fading away. The feeling of that flame warming me from within was receding ever further. I should have washed my hands of that person I’d become. I should have stood up and done something about it. But I kept putting it off. And before I got around to it, the one who gave up on it all was my wife. I was thirty-six at the time.

As I gazed at my reflection I wondered, Where am I headed? Before that, though, the question was Where have I come to? Where is this place? No, before that even I needed to ask, Who the hell am I?

As I stared at myself in the mirror, I thought about what it would be like to paint my own portrait. Say I were to try, what sort of self would I end up painting? Would I be able to find even a shred of affection for myself? Would I be able to discover even one thing shining within me?

“Do you remember how you sketched my face on our first date?” “I do.” “I take it out sometimes and look at it. It’s really well done. I feel like I’m looking at my real self.” “Your real self?” “Right.” “But don’t you see your face every morning in the mirror?” “That’s different,” Yuzu said. “My self in the mirror is just a physical reflection.”

You can have all the desire and ache inside you want, but what you really need is a concrete starting point.

Having a relationship with that older married woman, being able to hold a real live woman in my arms regularly, brought me a certain level of calm. The soft touch of a mature woman’s skin eased the pent-up emotions I’d had.

The courage not to fear a change in one’s lifestyle, the importance of having time on your side. And above all, discovering your own uniquely creative style and themes.

He must be living a life free of worries. But viewed from his perspective, looking at me from his side of the valley, I might appear to also be living a life of ease and leisure. From a distance, most things look beautiful.

Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.

But this painting titled Killing Commendatore was full of blood. Realistic blood flowing all over. Two men were fighting with heavy, ancient swords, in what seemed to be a duel. One of the men fighting was young, the other old. The young man had plunged his sword deep into the old man’s chest. The young man had a thin black mustache and wore tight-fitting light-greenish clothes. The old man was dressed in white and had a lush white beard. Around his neck was a necklace of beads. He had dropped his sword, which had not yet struck the ground. Blood was spewing from his chest. The tip of the sword must have pierced his aorta. The blood had soaked his white clothes, and his mouth was twisted in agony. His eyes were wide open, staring in disbelief into space. He realized he was defeated. But the real pain had yet to hit him. For his part, the young man’s eyes were cold, fixed on his opponent. Not a sign of regret in those eyes, not a hint of confusion or fear, or a trace of agitation. Totally composed, those eyes were simply watching the impending death of another, and his own unmistakable victory. The gushing blood was nothing more than proof of that, and elicited no emotional reaction whatsoever.

“The purer the curiosity is, the stronger it is. And the more money it takes to satisfy it.”

“The way I see it,” Menshiki said, “there’s a point in everybody’s life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes you have to grab it by the tail. Grab it hard, and never let go. There are some people who are able to, and others who can’t. Tomohiko Amada was one who could.”

We should wordlessly go to visit her, pushing our way through the lush green grass.

If he lived with someone he knew he would end up detesting them. Whether it was his parents, a wife, or children. He feared that above all. He wasn’t afraid of loving someone. What he feared was growing to hate someone.

If you don’t understand something, then stick with it until you do—that seemed to be Menshiki’s basic approach to life.

Even though she was the one who said she wanted to remain friends. That hurt far more than I’d expected. Or more precisely, what hurt me was actually me, myself. In the midst of that continuing, unsettled silence my feelings, like a heavy pendulum, a razor-sharp blade, made wide swings between one extreme to the other. That arc of emotions left fresh wounds in my skin.

“That sometimes in life we can’t grasp the boundary between reality and unreality. That boundary always seems to be shifting. As if the border between countries shifts from one day to the next depending on their mood. We need to pay close attention to that movement, otherwise we won’t know which side we’re on.

couldn’t hear anything, only the silence. Hearing silence—this was no play on words. On an isolated mountaintop, silence had a sound.

“I have another question,” I said. “Weren’t you originally a priest who undertook certain death austerities? A priest who voluntarily was buried underground, stopped eating and drinking, and chanted the sutras until you passed away? Didn’t you die in the pit while you continued to ring the bell, and eventually turned into a mummy?” “Hmm,” the Commendatore said, and shook his head a little. “Unclear. I can’t say, really. At a certain point I became a pure Idea. But I have no linear memory of what I was before that, where I was or what I did.”

Menshiki went on. “When you’re locked up alone in a cramped, dark place, the most frightening thing isn’t death. The most terrifying thought is that I might have to live here forever. Once you think that, the terror makes it hard to breathe. The walls close in on you and the delusion grabs you that you’re going to be crushed. In order to survive, a person has to overcome that fear. Which means conquering yourself. And in order to do that, you need to get as close to death as you possibly can.”

What you can see is real, the Commendatore whispered in my ear. What you need to do is open your eyes wide and look at it. You can judge it later on.

There was Shoko and Mariye, and then there was Menshiki. Each had a special magnetism. And I had landed smack in the middle of it all. Lacking any magnetism of my own to speak of.

It’s calling out to me, Mariye had said. Like a caged bird crying to be set free. The more I studied the painting the more I realized Mariye had hit the nail square on the head—something was desperately struggling to escape that enclosed space. It longed for a place less confined, for freedom. It was the strength of that will that gave the painting its impact. Whether we understood the meaning of the bird and the cage or not.

It seems as if, year after year, the world becomes a more difficult place to live.

Masahiko nodded. “Everything has a bright side,” he said. “The top of even the blackest, thickest cloud shines like silver.”

“This is what I think,” I said at last. “Ideas take their energy from the perceptions of others.”

“Tomorrow is tomorrow. Today is all we have right now,” Masahiko said.

People can accomplish anything, I thought, if they want it badly enough. There are channels through which reality can become unreal. Or unreality can enter the realm of the real. If we desire it that strongly. Deep in our heart. But that didn’t mean that we were free. It might demonstrate quite the opposite.

As I sat there staring at the finished work, a feeling came over me, what might be called a premonition of impending movement. On the surface at least, it was just as its title said: a landscape painting of the pit in the woods. It was so accurate, in fact, that “reproduction” might be closer to the truth. As someone who had been developing his craft, however imperfectly, for so long, I had the artistic skill to reproduce an exact likeness of the scene on canvas. I had not painted the scene so much as I had documented it. Nevertheless, that premonition was there. Something was about to take place within that landscape. The painting was telling me that. Then I realized. What I had been trying to get across, or what that something had been trying to get me to paint, was precisely that premonition, those signs.

“You have the strength to wish for what you cannot have. While I have only wished for those things I can possess.”

This was an old man with furrowed skin and white hair, experiencing the slow but steady annihilation of his physical existence.

“So are you saying all of this began when I brought the painting out into the light? Is that what you meant by ‘opening the circle’?” The Commendatore said nothing, just extended his hands palms up.

felt the rush of owl wings, and heard a bell ring in the dark. Everything was connected somewhere.

Now each of your actions will generate an equivalent response, in accordance with the principle of connectivity.

Tomohiko Amada’s Killing Commendatore might be seen as one such “unknown vista.” Like a great poem, the painting was a perfect metaphor, one that launched a new reality into the world.

“What are Double Metaphors?” I asked. “You should know the answer to that already.” “I should know?” “That is because they are within you,” said Donna Anna. “They grab hold of your true thoughts and feelings and devour them one after another, fattening themselves. That is what Double Metaphors are. They have been dwelling in the depths of your psyche since ancient times.”

Unbidden, the man with the white Subaru Forester entered my mind. I didn’t want him there. But there was no way around it. It was he who had pushed me to throttle that young woman, forcing me to look into the darkness of my own heart. He had reappeared more than once, to make sure I would remember that darkness. I know where you were and what you were doing, he was announcing to me. Of course he knew everything. Because he lived inside me.

“Your true heart lives in your memory. It is nourished by the images it contains—that’s how it lives,” a woman said.

Air, love, and ideals were important, no argument there, but you couldn’t survive on them alone.

“There are some things that can’t be explained in this life,” Menshiki went on, “and some others that probably shouldn’t be explained. Especially when putting them into words ignores what is most crucial.”

“There’s nothing to be done. Like I told you, dying is a major undertaking. It’s the person dying who has it hardest, though, so I really can’t complain.”

It was weird to look inside her own house from such a distance, and in such naked detail. It felt as if she had become one of the dead (how was unclear) and now was viewing her home from their vantage point. She had belonged there for so long, yet it was hers no more. She knew it so intimately but could never go back. It was a strange, dissociated sensation.

No need to worry. Time is the remedy for your concerns. It is the key for all things that possess form. True, time does not last forever, but as long as you have it, it is remarkably efficacious. So look forward to the future, my friends!”

“I think it’s cool,” Mariye said. “It’s a work in progress, and I’m a work in progress too, now and forever.” “None of us are ever finished. Everyone is always a work in progress.”

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

Understanding something and seeing it are two different things.

Yet it also struck me that it might have been a work that had to be lost. Tomohiko Amada had poured just too much of his passion, his soul, into it for it to be exposed to public view. It was filled with his spirit. Thus, although it was a superb painting, it possessed some sort of vicious power—it could summon things from the other side. By discovering it, I had set a cycle of some kind in motion.