Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

“There are plenty of things in history that are best left in the shadows. Accurate knowledge does not improve people’s lives. The objective does not necessarily surpass the subjective, you know. Reality does not necessarily extinguish fantasy.”

“Cannot you just let the painting speak for itself?” the Commendatore said softly. “If that painting wants to say something, then best to let it speak. Let metaphors be metaphors, a code a code, a sieve a sieve. Is there something wrong with that?”

“Franz Kafka was quite fond of slopes,” he said. “He was drawn to all sorts of slopes. He loved to gaze at homes built on the middle of a slope. He would sit by the side of the street for hours, staring at houses built like that. He never grew tired of it and would sit there, tilting his head to one side, then straightening it up again. A kind of strange fellow. Did you know this?”

Mariye took a moment to respond. “It’s funny, a man’s being killed, and his blood is flying all over the place, but it’s not depressing. It’s like the painting is trying to take me someplace else. Someplace where things like ‘proper’ and ‘improper’ don’t matter.”

“You know, the hollow wooden horse the Greeks built. They hid their warriors inside and presented it as a gift to the clueless Trojans, who dragged it inside their fortress. A camouflaged container, designed for a specific purpose.”

“Who was it that said, ‘The greatest surprise in life is old age’?” he asked.

Old age must be an even bigger shock than death. Far beyond what we can imagine. The day someone tells you that you’re flat-out useless, that your existence is irrelevant—biologically (and socially)—in this world.

“Women leave certain signs in situations like this. Like they start paying more attention to their makeup and their clothes, or change their perfume, or start a serious diet. I’ve tried to be careful, but even so.”

We all live our lives carrying secrets we cannot disclose.

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.

Muro thought about that for a while. But of course she couldn’t wrap her head around what I had said. She couldn’t understand tsunamis and earthquakes yet, or the meaning of death. All the same, I blocked her vision whenever the tsunami appeared on the screen. Understanding something and seeing it are two different things.

Mariye called me right after the fire, and we talked for half an hour about the little old house it had left in ashes. That house had been important to her. Not so much the building, perhaps, as the world it encompassed, and the time when it was an essential part of her life. That would include Tomohiko Amada, back in the days when he still lived there. Whenever she saw him, the painter was always immersed in his work. From Mariye’s experience, an artist was someone who holed up for days painting in his studio. She had watched Amada through the window of that house. Now it was gone, and she had lost that world forever. I shared her sadness. That house held deep meaning for me as well, though I had lived there less than eight months.

All the same, I figured that, little by little, that realm would disappear from Mariye’s mind. Her life would grow busier and more complicated as she moved into her late teens. She would no longer have time to consider crazy things like Ideas and Metaphors.

I will probably live the rest of my life in their company. My little daughter Muro is their gift to me. A form of grace. I am convinced of this. “The Commendatore was truly there,” I say to Muro as she lies sleeping. “You’d better believe it.”