Everything was connected somewhere.
“Affirmative! Everything is connected somewhere,” said the Commendatore. “And my friends cannot escape that connection, however my friends may try. So steel yourself, and kill me. There is no room for guilt. Tomohiko Amada needs your help. By slaying me, my friends can save him. Make happen here what should have happened in the past. Now is the time. Only my friends can grant him salvation before he breathes his last.”
I rose from my chair and strode to where the Commendatore was seated. I took his unsheathed sword in hand. I was past the point of determining what was just and unjust. In a world outside space and time, all dualities—before and after, up and down—ceased to exist. In such a world, I could no longer perceive myself as myself. I and myself were being torn apart.
The instant I took the sword in hand, however, I realized its handle was too small. It was a miniature sword for a tiny hand. There was simply no way could I kill the Commendatore with it, however keen its blade. The realization brought with it a sense of relief.
“The sword is too small. I can’t grip it,” I said to the Commendatore.
“That is a shame,” he said with a sigh. “Well, there is nothing to be done. We must use something else, although that means diverging further from the painting.”
“Something else?”
The Commendatore pointed to a small chest of drawers in the corner of the room. “Look inside the top drawer.”
I went to the chest and slid open the uppermost drawer.
“Within is a knife for filleting fish,” the Commendatore said.
Sure enough, a knife lay atop a small stack of neatly folded washcloths. The knife that Masahiko had used to prepare the sea bream he had brought to my home. An eight-inch blade honed to a razor’s edge. Masahiko always kept his tools in perfect shape. This knife was no exception.
“Now take that knife and plunge it into my chest,” said the Commendatore. “Sword or knife, what is the difference. We can still reenact the scene in Killing Commendatore. But we must make haste. There is little time.”
I took the knife in hand. It was as heavy as stone. The tip of the blade shone cold and white in the light streaming from the window. The knife had vanished from my kitchen and come to wait for me here, in the chest of drawers. Masahiko had sharpened the blade, as it turned out, for the sake of his own father. There seemed no way to avoid my fate.
I still couldn’t come to a decision. Nevertheless, I stepped behind the Commendatore’s chair, gripping the knife tightly in my right hand. From his bed, Tomohiko Amada stared at us with eyes as big as saucers. As if watching history unfold before his eyes. His mouth was open, exposing his yellowed teeth and whitish tongue, a tongue that lolled in his mouth as though trying to form words. Words this world would never hear.
“My friends do not have a violent bone in your body,” the Commendatore said, as if to admonish me. “It is obvious. My friends are not built to kill. But sometimes people must act against their nature, to rescue something important or for some greater purpose. Now is one of those times. So kill me! I am not big, as my friends can see, and I will not resist. I am merely an Idea. Just insert the tip of the knife into my heart. What could be more straightforward?”
The Commendatore pointed his tiny index finger at the spot where his heart was. But the thought of that heart inevitably recalled my sister’s. I could remember her operation as if it were yesterday. How delicate and difficult it had been. Saving a malfunctioning heart was a formidable task. It required a team of specialists and gallons of blood. Yet destroying a heart was so easy.
“Such thinking will get us nowhere,” the Commendatore said. “If my friends wish to save Mariye Akikawa, then do the deed. Even if my friends do not want to. Trust me. Jettison all feelings, and close your mind. But not your eyes. My friends must keep them open.”
I stepped behind the Commendatore and raised the knife. But I couldn’t bring it down. Sure, it might be only one of a thousand deaths for an Idea, but it was still extinguishing a life as far as I was concerned. Was this not the same order the young lieutenant had given Tsuguhiko Amada in Nanjing?
“Negative! It is not the same,” said the Commendatore. “My friends are doing this at my behest. It is I who am asking my friends to kill me. So that I may be reborn. Be strong. Close the circle at once.”
I closed my eyes and thought of the girl I had throttled in the love hotel in Miyagi. Of course, she and I had been pretending. I had squeezed her throat gently, so as not to kill her. I had been unable to do it long enough to satisfy her. Had I continued, I might indeed have strangled her to death. On the bed of that love hotel, I had glimpsed the deep rage within myself for the first time. It had churned in my chest like blood-soaked mud, pushing me closer and closer to real murder.
I know where you were and what you were doing, the man had said.
“All right, now bring it down,” the Commendatore said. “I know my friends can do it. Remember, my friends will not be killing me. My friends will be slaying your evil father. The blood of your evil father shall soak into the earth.”
My evil father?
Where did that come from?
“Who is the evil father of my friends?” the Commendatore said, reading my mind. “I believe your path crossed with his not long ago. Am I mistaken?”
Do not paint my portrait any further, the man had said. He had pointed his finger at me from within the dark mirror. It had pierced my chest like the tip of a sharp sword.
Spurred by that pain, I reflexively closed my heart and opened my eyes wide. I cleared all thought from my mind (as Don Giovanni had done in Killing Commendatore), buried my emotions, made my face a blank mask, and brought the knife down with all my might. The sharp blade entered the Commendatore’s tiny chest precisely where he had pointed. I felt the living flesh resist. But the Commendatore himself made no attempt to fend off the blow. His fingers clutched at the air, but apart from that he did not react. Still, the body he inhabited did all that it could to avoid its looming extinction. The Commendatore was an Idea, but his body was not. An Idea may have borrowed it for its own purposes, but that body would not meekly submit to death. It possessed its own rationale. I had to overcome that resistance through brute force, severing its life at the roots. “Kill me,” the Commendatore had said. But I was actually dispatching another someone’s body.
I wanted to drop the knife, drop everything, and run from the room. But the Commendatore’s words echoed in my ears. “If my friends wish to save Mariye Akikawa, then do the deed. Even if my friends do not want to.”
So I pushed the blade even farther into the Commendatore’s heart. If you’re stabbing someone to death, there’s no halfway. The tip of the knife emerged from his back—I had run him through. His white garment was dyed crimson. My hands were drenched in blood. But the blood did not spew into the air as it did in Killing Commendatore. This is an illusion, I tried to convince myself. I was murdering a mere phantom. My act was purely symbolic.