“Yes?”
“The other day you said you wouldn’t mind having a mummy join us for dinner, right?”
“I did say that, yes. I remember.”
“Is that invitation still open?”
Menshiki considered this for a moment and then gave a cheery laugh. “Of course it is. I meant what I said. The invitation is still open.”
“Something happened and the mummy won’t be able to come, but instead the Commendatore says he’d like to. Is it all right to invite the Commendatore?”
“Of course,” Menshiki said without hesitation. “Like Don Giovanni invited the statue to dinner, I would be pleased to have the Commendatore come to dinner in my humble abode. But unlike Don Giovanni in the opera, I haven’t done anything so bad that I deserve to be thrown into hell. At least I don’t think I have. After dinner I’m not going to be pulled into hell or anything, I hope?”
“That won’t happen,” I replied. Though honestly I wasn’t all that confident. I couldn’t predict anymore what was going to happen next.
“Good. I’m not ready for hell quite yet,” Menshiki said cheerily. As you might expect, he was taking it all as a clever joke. “One question, though. As a dead person, Don Giovanni’s Commendatore wasn’t able to eat earthly food, but what about this Commendatore? Should I prepare food for him? Or does he not take any worldly food?”
“There’s no need to prepare food for him. He doesn’t eat or drink. But it wouldn’t be a problem if you set a place for him.”
“Because he’s basically a spiritual being?”
“I believe so.” An Idea and a spirit were a little different, I thought, but I didn’t want to get into it.
“I’m fine with that,” Menshiki said. “I’ll make sure the Commendatore has his own seat at the table. It’s an unexpected pleasure to be able to invite the famous Commendatore to dinner in my humble home. It’s too bad, though, that he won’t be able to sample the food. We’ll have some delicious wine as well.”
I thanked Menshiki.
“Until tomorrow, then,” Menshiki said, and hung up.
* * *
—
That night, the bell didn’t ring. The Commendatore must have been tired out from materializing during the day (and answering my questions). Or maybe he no longer felt the need to summon me to the studio. At any rate, I slept a deep, dreamless sleep until morning.
The next morning as I painted in the studio the Commendatore didn’t make an appearance. So for two hours, I was able to forget everything and focus on painting. The first thing I did that day was paint over the outline, like spreading a thick slab of butter on toast.
I started with a deep red, an edgy, offbeat green, and a grayish black. These were the colors the man wanted. It took a while to mix the right colors. As I went through this process I put on the record of Mozart’s Don Giovanni. With that music playing, it felt like the Commendatore would appear behind me at any minute, though he didn’t.
That day, Tuesday, the Commendatore, like the horned owl up in the attic, maintained a deep silence. But that didn’t bother me particularly. As a flesh-and-blood person, I couldn’t worry about an Idea. Ideas had their own way of doing things. And I had my own life. I focused on completing The Man with the White Subaru Forester. Whether I was in the studio or out, standing before the canvas or not, the image of the painting was never far from my mind.
According to the radio weather report, there was supposed to be heavy rain that night in the Kanto-Tokai region. And off to the west the weather was indeed taking a turn for the worse. In southern Kyushu torrential rains had made rivers overflow, and people living in lowlying areas had had to evacuate. People in higher areas were warned to watch out for landslides.
A dinner party on a night when it’s going to be pouring, I thought.
I thought of that dark hole in the middle of the woods. That weird stone-lined little chamber that Menshiki and I had exposed to the light of day when we moved the heavy rocks of the mound. I pictured myself sitting alone at the bottom of that pitch-dark hole listening to rain pounding on the wooden cover. I’m shut up inside that hole, unable to escape. The ladder’s been taken away, the heavy cover shut tight right above me. And everyone in the world has completely forgotten I’ve been left behind. Or perhaps they think I’m long dead. But I am still alive. Lonely, but still breathing. All I can hear is the downpour. There’s no light. Not a single ray reaches me. The stone wall I’m leaning against is damply cold. It’s the middle of the night. All sorts of bugs might ooze their way out.
As this scene took shape in my mind, I gradually found it hard to breathe. I went out to the terrace, leaned against the railing, slowly breathed in the fresh air through my nose, and slowly exhaled through my mouth. As always, I counted the number of breaths and repeated this process at regular intervals. After repeating this for a while, I was able to breathe normally again. The twilight sky was covered in heavy, leaden clouds. The rain was getting closer.
Menshiki’s white mansion appeared faintly across the valley. This evening that’s where I’ll be having dinner, I thought. Menshiki, me, and the famous Commendatore—three of us seated around the dining table.
Affirmative. That is real blood I’m talking about, you know, the Commendatore whispered in my ear.
23
THEY ALL REALLY EXIST
When I was thirteen and my little sister was ten, the two of us traveled by ourselves to Yamanashi Prefecture during summer vacation. Our mother’s brother worked in a research lab at a university in Yamanashi and we went to stay with him. This was the first trip we kids had taken by ourselves. My sister was feeling relatively good then, so our parents gave us permission to travel alone.
Our uncle was single (and still is single, even now), and had just turned thirty, I think, at that time. He was doing gene research (and still is), was very quiet and kind of unworldly, though a very open, straightforward person. He loved reading and knew everything about nature. He enjoyed taking walks in the mountains more than anything, which, he said, was why he had taken a university job in rural, mountainous Yamanashi. My sister and I liked our uncle a lot.
Backpacks in tow, we boarded an express train at Shinjuku Station bound for Matsumoto, and got off at Kofu. Our uncle came to pick us up at Kofu Station. He was spectacularly tall, and even in the crowded station, we spotted him right away. He was renting a small house in Kofu along with a friend of his, but his roommate was abroad so we were given our own room to sleep in. We stayed in that house for one week. And almost every day we took walks with our uncle in the nearby mountains. He taught us the names of all kinds of flowers and insects. We cherished our memories of that summer.