Killing Commendatore

Haruki Murikami

Penguin Random House

Otago Daily Times, December 8th 2018

Once a writer reaches a certain level of popularity there is a tendency for editors to step back and leave them to their own devices, at which point their stories tend to balloon to physically and literarily unwieldy dimensions. Haruki Murikami’s latest novel, Killing Commendatore, is a case in point: although it is, in part, a modern retelling of The Great Gatsby, it is more Beckett than Fitzgerald; 681 pages of text in which nothing happens, repeatedly.    

Following the dissolution of his marriage, the tale’s unnamed narrator is living high in the hills outside Odawara in the former home of Tomohiko Amada, a renowned painter in the traditional Japanese style. An artist himself, he has spent years doing sterile, corporate portraits and is eager to return to artistic art but is bereft of inspiration until he discovers a previously unknown Amada painting, Killing Commendatore, hidden in the attic. The startlingly violent picture, very different from Amada’s usual harmonious style, is a Japanicized depiction of the first-act duel from Don Giovanni. It is imbalanced and made all the more striking by the presence of a mysterious, long-faced observer emerging from the earth who seems to be inviting the viewer into the world underground.

 Inspired by the painting and the subsequent appearance in his studio of an ‘instantiated Idea’ in the form of the unfortunate Commendatore, the narrator embarks on a series of works unlike any he has produced before. The first of these is a portrait commissioned by the reclusive millionaire, Wataru Menshiki, who lives in an opulent mansion across the valley.

As it transpires, Menshiki has an ulterior motive for making the acquaintance of his neighbour, which is to enlist his help in meeting a young girl, Mariye Akikawa, who whom he believes to be his daughter. The narrator reluctantly agrees to paint Mariye, enabling Menshiki to ‘accidentally’ visit during a sitting but remains uneasy about his patron’s motives and feels strongly protective of the girl, who reminds him of his deceased younger sister. Then Mariye disappears, and, spurred on by the Commendatore, he embarks on a literal journey through a figurative world to rescue her.

Although the Gatsby homage forms the novel’s structural underpinning, it is redolent with numerous other literary allusions from Lolita to Orpheus and Euridice, as well as nods to previous novels (Menshiki means ‘avoiding colours, and the Amada property features a well-like pit that leads to an alternative universe to give just two examples). It is also augmented by a number of supplementary storylines, at least one of which, The Wind Cave, has appeared as a short story in its own right. Despite this, the plot unfolds with glacial slowness, taking almost six hundred pages to reach any kind of climax and dissolves without conclusive resolution.

Murikami has described his 2002 novel, Kafka on the Shore as containing several riddles that interact to produce a solution unique to each reader, and this is a pattern that recurs throughout his writing. With its emotionally and materially ascetic narrator, meticulously detailed descriptions of the minutae of life  – meal preparation, clothing, weather and accompanying music – and interspersed scenes that read like lucid dream, Killing Commendatore is quintessential Murakami writ large.

The story as a whole could be experienced as a zen-like meditation on the nature of artistic inspiration or a figurative exploration of the creative process. Unfortunately, for many readers it is likely to be a metaphor that is extended far beyond breaking point.