Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

But I will not become like Menshiki. He has built his life by balancing the possibility that Mariye Akikawa is his child with the possibility that she isn’t. It is through the subtle and unending oscillation between those two poles that he seeks to find the meaning of his own existence. I have no need, though, to challenge my life in such a troublesome (or, at the least, unnatural) way. That is because I am endowed with the capacity to believe. I believe in all honesty that something will appear to guide me through the darkest and narrowest tunnel, or across the most desolate plain. That’s what I learned from the strange events I experienced while living in that mountaintop house on the outskirts of Odawara.