Killing Commendatore

by Haruki Murakami

agape

placid,

qualms

Most people were happy, even enthusiastic, to talk about themselves. (Most likely no one else wanted to hear those things.)

camisole

We’d lived under the same roof for six years, yet I knew next to nothing about this woman. In the same way that people stare up at the sky to see the moon every night, yet understand next to nothing about it.

From start to finish, though, the news had nothing to do with me, like events happening on some other planet. Or else some fake stories somebody had cooked up for the fun of it.

tatami,

dilapidated,

hearth

perfunctory

languidly

Somehow the flow of my life had gone off in the wrong direction. I needed time, I thought. I had to be patient. Make time be on my side. Do that, and I was sure to seize the right flow. That channel would surely come back to me. Truthfully, though, I wasn’t sure it ever would.

When Claude Debussy had writer’s block while composing an opera, he wrote, “Day after day I produce rien—nothingness.”

unfettered

hollows

astounding.

I turned the pages and followed along, in chronological order, to see how he shifted gears to become a painter of Japanese-style art. In his early period these works were still a bit awkward, imitating the methods of previous artists, but then gradually, and undeniably, he discovered his own unique style. I could see how it progressed. A bit of trial and error at times, but no hesitation. After he took up painting Japanese-style art, his works all had something unique that only he could paint, and he himself was well aware of this.

strode

inimitable

The wonderful part about his paintings was the use of blank space. Paradoxically, the best part was what was not depicted. By not painting certain things he clearly accentuated what he did want to paint. This is undoubtedly one of the areas that Japanese painting excels at. At least I’d never seen such bold use of blank space in any Western paintings.

leitmotif

whether something is logical or isn’t, what’s meaningful about it are the effects. Effects are there for anyone to see, and can have a real influence. But pinpointing the cause that produced the effect isn’t easy. It’s even harder to show people something concrete that caused it, in a “Look, see?” kind of way. Of course there is a cause somewhere. Can’t be an effect without a cause. You can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs. Like falling dominoes, one domino (cause) knocks over the adjacent domino (cause), which then knocks over the domino (cause) next to it. As this sequence continues on and on, you no longer know what was the original cause. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Or people don’t care to know. And the story comes down to “What happened was, a lot of dominoes fell over.” The story I’ll be telling here may very well follow a similar route.

maelstrom,

my curiosity won out over any sense of etiquette or common sense. Whether this was the professional curiosity of an artist, or simple personal curiosity, I couldn’t say.

zori

scraggly

Probably nothing ever took him by surprise. He was not a born killer, and he didn’t enjoy killing. But if it served his purpose he wouldn’t hesitate to kill. He was young, burning with idealism (though of what kind I have no idea), a man overflowing with strength.

rake

stubble

fazed,

contrived.

He’d simply wanted to throw in a pause bef...

lustrous

spry

quivered

surmised

mulled

placid

drudgery

paintings done using glue and pigment and foil leaf. And done not with a paintbrush, but with a writing brush. In other words Japanese paintings are defined mainly by the materials used to paint them. The transmission of ancient, traditional techniques is one feature, though there are lots of Japanese paintings done using avant-garde techniques, and with colors, too, there is a lot of use of new materials. So the definition has steadily become increasingly vague.

Japanese Spirit with Western Learning.’

swirling.

taciturn,

flustered,

brazen

spurred

thicket

enigmatic

mottled