Killing Commendatore: A novel (69 page)

I called my former agent in Tokyo and told him I wanted to go back to portrait painting. He couldn't have been happier. They were always short of skilled artists.

“But you told me you were through with the business, didn't you?” he said.

“I changed my mind,” I answered. Why exactly, I didn't say. He didn't ask, either.

I wanted to live without thinking about anything for a while, to let my hands move on their own, churning out normal, “commercial” portraits one after the other. In the process, I could gain some financial stability. I didn't know how long I could keep that up. I couldn't predict the future. But for the time being, at least, that's what I wanted. To use my hard-won skills without calling up any complicated thoughts. To avoid getting mixed up with Ideas, or Metaphors, or anything along those lines. To keep a safe distance from the messy private affairs of the wealthy, mysterious man who lived across the valley. Not to be dragged into any more dark tunnels for having brought hidden masterpieces into the light. More than anything, that's what I desired.

I met Yuzu. We talked over coffee and Perrier at a café not far from her office. Her belly wasn't as big as I had imagined.

“You're not planning to marry the father?” I asked her right off the bat.

She shook her head. “No, not at the present time.”

“Why?”

“I just feel that's for the best.”

“But you plan to have the child, right?”

She gave a little nod. “Of course. Can't turn back now.”

“Are you living with him?”

“No, I'm not. Since you left I've lived alone.”

“How come?”

“For one thing, we're not divorced yet.”

“But I sent you the divorce papers a while ago, signed and sealed. So I assumed we were already divorced.”

Yuzu was quiet for a moment. “To be honest, I never submitted them,” she said at last. “I couldn't somehow, so I let them sit. You and I have been legally married all this time. That means the baby will legally be your child, whether we get divorced or not. You won't bear any responsibility for it, of course.”

I couldn't grasp what she meant. “But biologically speaking, the baby is his, correct?”

Yuzu looked me in the eye. “It's not that simple,” she said at last.

“What do you mean?”

“How can I put this? I'm not a hundred percent certain the baby is his.”

Now it was my turn to look her in the eye. “Are you saying you don't know who got you pregnant?”

She nodded.
I don't know.

“But it's not what you're thinking,” she said. “I wasn't sleeping around. I can only have a sexual relationship with one man at a time. That's why I stopped sleeping with you. Right?”

I nodded.

“I felt sorry for you, though.”

I nodded again.

“But I was careful to use protection with him. I didn't want a child. You know how I felt. I was ultra-cautious about those things. And yet I got pregnant, just like that.”

“There can always be slipups, no matter how careful we try to be.”

“Women know when something like that happens,” Yuzu said, shaking her head. “We have a sixth sense that tells us. I don't think men have it.”

Of course, I didn't.

“At any rate, you're planning to have the baby,” I said.

Yuzu nodded.

“But you never wanted one. At least as long as we were together.”

“That's true,” she said. “I didn't want one with you. I didn't want one with anybody.”

“And yet now you're going to go ahead and bring a child into the world without knowing who the father is. Why didn't you have an abortion? You could have done so earlier.”

“I thought about it, of course. And part of me wanted one.”

“But you didn't.”

“This is how I think these days,” Yuzu said. “This is my life, sure, but in the end almost all that happens in it may be decided arbitrarily, quite apart from me. In other words, although I may presume I have free will, in fact I may not be making any of the major decisions that affect me. I've come to think my pregnancy is an example of that.”

I listened to her without saying anything.

“I know this sounds fatalistic, but it's what I have
truly
come to feel. Honestly and deeply. So then I thought, if that's how things work, why not have the child and raise it on my own. See it through, and find out what happens. That's come to seem terribly important.”

“There's just one thing I need to ask,” I said, diving in.

“What is it?”

“It's a simple question, one that requires a mere yes or no. I won't say anything more.”

“No problem. Ask away.”

“Can I return to you—would you take me back?”

Her brow furrowed slightly. She looked me hard in the face for a moment. “Do you mean you wish to live once more as husband and wife?”

“If that's possible.”

“I'd like that,” she said quietly. There was no hesitation in her voice. “You are still my husband, and your room is as you left it. You can come back anytime you wish.”

“Are you still seeing the other man?” I inquired.

Yuzu quietly shook her head. “No, that's over.”

“Why?”

“I didn't want to allow him parental rights—that's the main reason.”

I said nothing.

“It seems to have come as a great shock to him. Only natural, I guess,” she said. She rubbed her cheeks with her hands.

“But you would allow me?”

She rested her hands on the table and once again looked at me closely.

“You've changed a little, haven't you? Your features, or maybe your expression?”

“I don't know how I look, but I have learned a few things, I think.”

“I may have learned a few things myself.”

I picked up my cup and drained what was left of my coffee.

“Masahiko's father just passed away,” I said, “so he's got a lot to deal with right now. When things have settled down for him, I'll pack my bags and return to our apartment in Hiroo, probably sometime early in the New Year. Assuming that's all right with you, of course.”

She studied my face. As if gazing at a landscape she had missed for a very long time. Finally, she reached across the table and gently covered my hand with hers.

“I'd like to give it another try,” she said. “In fact, I've been thinking that for a while.”

“I've been thinking the same thing,” I said.

“I don't know if it will work out or not.”

“I don't know either. But it's worth a shot.”

“I'm about to have a baby without knowing who the father is. Is that going to be all right with you?”

“I don't have a problem with that,” I said. “I know you're going to think I'm crazy, but there's a possibility that I could be the baby's father—potentially. That's my feeling, anyway. I could have somehow gotten you pregnant, mentally, from a distance. As a concept, using a special route.”

“As a concept?”

“That's one hypothesis.”

Yuzu considered that for a minute. “If that's true,” she said, “then that's one heck of a hypothesis.”

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

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.

It was several years after I moved back in with my wife that, on March 11, a huge earthquake devastated northeastern Japan. I sat in front of the television as, one after another, coastal villages and towns from Iwate all the way down to Miyagi were laid to waste before my eyes. That was the very same region I had driven through in my old Peugeot 205. I had encountered the man with the white Subaru Forester in one of those towns. Yet now all I could see were the remains of communities leveled by a tsunami that had fallen on them like some giant beast, leaving nothing in its wake but drowned wreckage. Try as I might, I could find no visible connection to
that town
. Since I couldn't remember the name of the place, I had no way of learning how much damage it had suffered, or how it had been changed.

I couldn't bring myself to do anything—I just sat staring at the TV screen for days on end in stunned silence. I was transfixed. I prayed to find something, anything, connected to my memories. If I failed, I feared, something stored within me, something very important, would be lost for good, carried off to some distant, unknown place. I wanted to hop in my car and drive to the stricken region. See for myself what had survived the disaster. That was out of the question, of course. The main roads had been torn to pieces, which meant that towns and villages were cut off from the world. Electricity, gas, water—all lifelines had been severed. Farther south, on the coast of Fukushima (where I had abandoned my Peugeot when it gave up the ghost), several nuclear reactors were in meltdown. It was impossible to venture into that part of the country.

I had not been a happy man when I had traveled there. It had been a lonely, painful, thoroughly wretched period in my life. I think I was lost in a number of ways. Nevertheless, the trip had allowed me to spend time among unfamiliar people, and witness their lives. I had not imagined then how valuable that would turn out to be. In the process—usually unconsciously—I had discarded some things and picked up others. By the time I passed through all those places I had become a somewhat different person.

I thought of
The Man with the White Subaru Forester
hidden in the attic of the Odawara house. Had that man—whether he belonged to the real world or not—still been living in the same town when disaster struck? What about the skinny young woman with whom I had spent that strange night. Had they and the other inhabitants been able to escape the earthquake and tsunami? Were they still alive? What was the fate of the love hotel and the roadside restaurant?

When five o'clock came around, I would go to pick up our daughter at the nursery school. This was my designated role (my wife having gone back to work at the architectural firm). On an adult's legs, the school was a ten-minute walk away. Then the two of us would slowly stroll home, hand in hand. If the weather was good, we would stop by a park on the way to sit on a bench and watch the neighborhood dogs pass by. Our daughter wanted a little dog of her own, but no pets were permitted in our apartment building, so she had to make do with looking at them in the park. Every so often, someone would let her pet their small, unthreatening dog.

Our daughter's name was Muro. Yuzu had chosen it. She had seen the name in a dream shortly before the baby was born. In the dream, she had been in a large Japanese-style room that looked out over a spacious and beautiful garden. There was a low, old-fashioned writing desk, and on top of that a sheet of white paper. On the paper a single character,
室
(Muro), had been written in bright black ink. The calligraphy was magnificent. That was Yuzu's dream. It stayed stuck in her mind even after she awoke. Thus, she decided, Muro had to be the baby's name. I was fine with that, of course. After all, she was the one having the baby. The idea that the calligrapher might be Tomohiko Amada popped into my head. But that was just a passing thought. When you came right down to it, it was only a dream, nothing more.

I was happy the child was a girl. I had grown up with my younger sister Komi, so I found it relaxing to have a little girl around. It felt as natural as could be. I was happy, too, that she came into this world with her name already settled. Names are important, whatever one might say.

When we got home, Muro and I watched the news together. I tried to shield her from shots of towns being swallowed by the tsunami. I thought the images were too disturbing for a young child. I was quick to cover her eyes when they came on the screen.

“Why, Daddy?” Muro asked me.

“Because you're still too young.”

“But it's real, isn't it?”

“Yes, it is. It's really happening somewhere far from here. But just because it's real doesn't mean you have to see it.”

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.

One time, I saw the man with the white Subaru Forester on TV. Or at least I thought I did. They were shooting a large fishing vessel stranded on a bluff some distance from shore, and
he
was standing nearby. Like an elephant keeper beside an elephant that had outlived its usefulness. But that shot was quickly followed by another. I couldn't be sure if it was really the man with the white Subaru Forester or not. But to me the tall fellow in the black windbreaker and black cap with a Yonex logo could be no one else.

His image came and went. There was only a brief second before the camera angle shifted.

Besides watching news about the earthquake, I painted “commercial” portraits on commission to shore up our finances. It was something I could do without thinking—when I sat before the canvas, my hands moved almost automatically. I had been seeking just that sort of life. And that's what people had been seeking from me. The work provided a steady income. I needed that too. I had a family to take into account.

Two months after the earthquake, my old home in Odawara burned down. The house on the mountain where Tomohiko Amada had spent half his life. Masahiko called with the news. He had been tearing his hair out over how to look after it once I had left, and it turned out his fears were well founded. It had caught fire just before dawn at the end of the May holidays, and although firemen had rushed to the scene, the old wooden structure had almost burned to the ground by the time they arrived (the fire trucks had trouble navigating the steep and twisting road). Luckily, it had rained the night before, so flames hadn't spread to the surrounding trees. The fire department investigated, but to no avail. It might have been an electrical short circuit, but then again it could have been arson.

The first thing that came to mind when I heard the news was
Killing Commendatore
. It must have been incinerated along with the house. Same with
The Man with the White Subaru Forester
. And the record collection. Had the owl in the attic managed to escape?

Killing Commendatore
was without a doubt one of Tomohiko Amada's best works, its demise a great loss to Japan's art world. Yet only a few people had laid eyes on it. Just Mariye Akikawa and me. Shoko Akikawa, very briefly. Its creator, Tomohiko Amada, of course. After that, possibly no one. Now it was gone forever, swallowed by the flames. I couldn't shake the feeling that I was somehow to blame. Shouldn't I have made public Tomohiko Amada's hidden masterpiece? Instead, I had bundled it up and stuck it back in the attic. Now it was just a pile of ashes. (I had carefully copied the characters who appeared in it in my sketchbook, all that remained of
Killing Commendatore
.) As a self-respecting artist myself, the idea pained me. The painting was so wonderful, I thought. Perhaps I had committed a crime against art itself.

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. Dragging a painting like that out into the light could well have been a big mistake. Wasn't that what the artist himself had thought? Wasn't that why he had hidden it in the attic, away from view? If so, then I had respected his wishes. Whichever the case, it had been lost to the flames, and there was no way anyone could turn back time to recover it.

I didn't regret the loss of
The Man with the White Subaru Forester
for a moment. I knew I would tackle that subject again in the future. By then, though, I would have become a more resolute man, and an artist of greater integrity. When it came time to create my own art again, I should be able to paint
The Man with the White Subaru Forester
from a whole new angle. Perhaps that work would become my own
Killing Commendatore
. If that happened, it would be the greatest legacy I could receive from Tomohiko Amada.

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.

At the end of our call, Mariye told me that her breasts were much bigger than before. By now, she was in her second year of high school. I had not seen her once since my departure. Our relationship consisted of an occasional phone call. I didn't particularly want to revisit the house, nor had I any compelling reason to go there. It was always Mariye who called me.

“They haven't filled out yet, but they're definitely growing,” she whispered confidentially. It took me a while to register what she was talking about.

“Just as the Commendatore prophesied,” she said.

That's wonderful, I said. I considered asking if she had a boyfriend, but decided against it.

Her aunt was still seeing Menshiki. She had revealed that to Mariye at some point. That they were
very close indeed
. And that they might get married before too long.

“Would you live with us if that happened?” her aunt had asked.

Mariye had pretended she hadn't heard. She was good at that.

I found the idea a bit unsettling. “Are you intending to live with Mr. Menshiki?” I asked her.

“I don't think so,” she said. “But I'm not so sure.”

Not so sure?

“I thought you had some pretty bad memories of his house,” I said, my bafflement showing.

“All of that happened when I was a kid. It seems so long ago. And there's no way I'm going to live alone with my father.”

So long ago?

It felt like yesterday to me. When I said that to Mariye, though, she didn't respond. Perhaps she wanted to forget those days, and what had taken place then. Or maybe she already had. Now that she was older, she might even have started to develop an interest in Menshiki, however slight. Maybe she had come to see something special in him, a blood tie of some sort.

“I really want to see what happened to that closetful of clothes,” Mariye said.

“That room attracts you, doesn't it?”

“That's because those clothes protected me,” she said. “But who knows, I may live on my own when I go to college.”

Sounds good to me, I said.

“So what's the situation with the pit behind the shrine?” I asked.

“No change,” Mariye replied. “The blue plastic sheet's still on it, even after the fire. Leaves will cover it eventually. Then maybe no one will know it's even there.”

The little old bell would be lying on the floor of the pit. Together with the flashlight I had taken from Tomohiko Amada's room at the nursing home.

“Have you seen the Commendatore?” I asked.

“No, not once. It's hard to believe he really existed.”

“He did, all right,” I said. “You'd better believe it.”

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.

Every so often, I found myself wondering about the plastic penguin. I had given it to the faceless man as payment for ferrying me across the river. There had been no alternative, given the swiftness of the current. I could only pray that little penguin was watching over Mariye from somewhere—probably as it shuttled back and forth between presence and absence.

I still can't be sure about the identity of Muro's father. A DNA test would tell me, but I have no desire to know the result. Perhaps we'll find out somewhere along the way. The truth may be revealed. But what meaning would that “truth” carry? Muro is my child in the legal sense, and I love her deeply. I treasure the time we spend together. I couldn't care less who her biological father is or isn't. The question is inconsequential. It can change nothing.

I went to Yuzu in a dream as I wandered from town to town in northeastern Japan. I made love to her while she was asleep, stealing into her dream and impregnating her, so that nine months and a few days later she bore a child. I love this idea (although I hold it in secret). That child's father is me as Idea, or perhaps me as Metaphor. Just as the Commendatore visited me, or as Donna Anna guided me through the dark, so did I, in some alternate world, deposit my seed in Yuzu's womb.