“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.
But I will not become like Menshiki. He has built his life by balancing the possibility that Mariye Akikawa is his child with the possibility that she isn’t. It is through the subtle and unending oscillation between those two poles that he seeks to find the meaning of his own existence. I have no need, though, to challenge my life in such a troublesome (or, at the least, unnatural) way. That is because I am endowed with the capacity to believe. I believe in all honesty that something will appear to guide me through the darkest and narrowest tunnel, or across the most desolate plain. That’s what I learned from the strange events I experienced while living in that mountaintop house on the outskirts of Odawara.
Killing Commendatore may have been lost forever in the flames that hour before dawn, yet its beauty and power live within me even now. I can call up the images of the Commendatore, Donna Anna, the faceless man, and the rest with perfect clarity. They look so tangible, so real, I feel as though I could reach out and touch them. Contemplating them affords me perfect tranquility, as though I were watching raindrops fall on the surface of a broad reservoir. That soundless rain will fall forever in my heart.
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.”