A Review of Haruki Murakami’s “Killing Commendatore”
Art for Art’s Sake
Reading the works of Haruki Murakami is a little like biting into a piece of dark chocolate: richly satisfying. That’s not to say that he hasn’t turned in bad novels — he has — but when he’s on top of his game, you are in for an experience. Having read most of Murakami’s books, I can say that they’re divided into romantic kitchen-sink realism and tales of the fantastic. His 2018 novel, Killing Commendatore, falls into the latter camp. It is a deeply satisfying novel — though, at about 700 pages in length, it could have used a bit of pruning. The plot somewhat harkens back to what is probably Murakami’s best-known novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but this book is something of its own beast, even if deep dark pits in the earth feature prominently in both novels.
Killing Commendatore focuses on an unnamed male protagonist who is a successful portrait painter. One day, his wife leaves him, for seemingly little reason, so he heads out on a long journey across Japan by car. When he’s finished with that, he holes up in the home of a former painter to be inspired to paint again. However, he finds an unseen painting by the artist of the home he’s now residing at in the attic, and that opens up a whole slew of complications: he begins to hear a bell ringing in the middle of the night, he discovers a pit in the backyard, and a mysterious figure approaches him, asking him if he could paint his portrait in any style at all for an obscene amount of money. Things get really strange, as per a Murakami novel, when a character in the painting the unnamed protagonist has discovered appears in human form, albeit as a two-foot tall representation.
As the saying goes, the weird goes pro from there. (Or, as Murakami might put it, the circle has been opened.)
This is ultimately a novel about solitude. Pages pass where the character sits alone at his painter’s stool and contemplates the world. Maybe he’ll spend a page making dinner or a paragraph making coffee. Things move at a deliberately glacial pace in this work, as though the author wanted you to really savour the world that these characters inhabit. However, this is also a work about the intrusion of solitude: the main character keeps getting interrupted by characters who have their own motives at play for wanting to interact with him. It’s as though Murakami wants to say that you really can’t be lonely in this world, particularly if you’re an artist. Which brings me to my next point: this is also a novel about art, the meaning of art, and what makes art art. There are pages of discussion between characters about what particular paintings mean to them, which is a little hard to fathom because these paintings only exist in Murakami’s head. You kinda have to take his word for it that these pieces are any good.
As with some Murakami novels, there’s a bit of an uncomfortable element to the work. The book introduces a 13-year-old girl that the unnamed protagonist is commissioned to paint, and this bit may leave some readers feeling a bit disturbed. The first time these characters meet, they have a conversation about breasts and penises, which is probably not the kind of conversation a 30-something-year-old man should be having with an early teenager. Murakami side-steps the pedophile angle by making this girl a sort of replacement for Mr. Unnamed Protagonist’s deceased little sister (who died of a heart problem when she was 12), but it still may make you a bit uncomfortable. I suppose this is a part of the Japanese tradition of fetishizing youth, but one wonders if this 13-year-old girl could be focused on more things in life other than the size of her breasts.
Still, despite that blemish — and Killing Commendatore is a work not without problems — this is an enjoyable piece of art and is almost top-tier Murakami, after The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and A Wild Sheep Chase. Even though one could carp that this book is a little long — a significant part of the end of the book involves a character hiding in another character’s house and lengthy descriptions of this character doing nothing but hiding — it is an exquisite work of unparalleled genius. Killing Commendatore is wholly imaginative, a tour-de-force of 21st-century fiction, and a delight to read (mostly). This is the type of book you could brew a nice cup of matcha to and then bunker down under the covers of your bed to read at a leisurely pace. And, don’t doubt the word “leisurely” as this book is a long one — the typeset is rather small, making this work easily feel that it could be a 1,000-page doorstop. Still, the twists and turns of this book make it an engaging read, and you can even go back to the beginning and read it again as there’s a little bit of a narrative loop at the start that makes more sense after you’ve finished the read.
For all of its focus on closing circles that have been unintentionally opened, Killing Commendatore is a brazen novel. It defies characterization, even though the publisher might want you to see this work as a homage to The Great Gatsby, which I don’t really see. (If you do, feel free to leave me a comment below as to why and how.) This is a great, great read, one that will stay with you for some time, but you do have to be attuned to the level of “weird” that Murakami brings to his settings sometimes. If you can stomach the fantastic in your fiction, strap on your seatbelts and climb into a Subaru Forester because, with Killing Commendatore, you’re in for one heck of a ride through the back alleys of Japan. Despite its flaws, this is a highly commendable book and a staggering achievement.
Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was published in paperback by Vintage on October 1, 2019.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
