Killing Commendatore

If this was a dream, then the world I'm living in itself must all be a dream. Maybe someday I'll be able to draw a portrait of nothingness. Just like another artist was able to complete a painting titled Killing Commendatore. But to do so I would need time to get to that point. I would have to have time on my side.

So, maybe Haruki Murakami keeps writing the same book over and over – Killing Commendatore felt a bit like a mashup of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and 1Q84 – but just maybe I want to keep reading the same book over and over: no other author so completely engages my mind like Murakami does. This book is too long, covers no new ground, and I enjoyed every bit of it (OK, except for a grown man's detached interest in a young girl's developing breasts; that felt icky). After being ever-so-slightly disappointed with Murakami's last two books, I'm happy he has returned to the familiar territory that I like so well.

I felt relieved to know I wasn't crazy, but I had to admit that the unreality of the situation had now, through Menshiki, taken on a reality, creating a slight gap in the seam of the world.

This “unreality” is spooky territory for me – a pit, a bell, unknowingly opening a circle that must be closed – and there's just something about the way that Murakami writes that gets my full interest. The plot: A recently divorced 36 year old portrait artist wants to start over, to rediscover his love of painting, and he takes up his friend's offer to stay in the empty mountain home of the friend's famous artist father. While exploring the attic one day, the (unnamed) narrator discovers an unknown painting by the home's owner, apparently entitled Killing Commendatore, and after studying it for a while, he realises that the painting is of an assassination scene from the opera Don Giovanni, reinterpreted in a traditional Japanese style of painting. That night, the narrator hears the faint ringing of a bell in the distance, and when he tracks down its source, he (and some of his new neighbours) are set on a dangerous track of self-discovery.

What's different about this book: Because the narrator is a painter, he describes the world through that medium. But he also listens to a lot of the homeowner's classical music collection, understanding how music can also describe the world and noting that Richard Strauss once said that he could perfectly capture the essence of something as ordinary as a broom in his music. It all becomes meta when you realise that this is writing about painting about music; that Murakami has a painter use the metaphor of the assassination in an opera to capture the truth about an artist's subconscious mind; that Murakami is using a painting based on an opera to describe the writing process:

I stepped back to look at the lines I'd done, made a few corrections, and added some new lines. What was important was believing in myself. Believing in the power of the lines, in the power of the space the lines divided. I wasn't speaking, but letting the lines and spaces speak. Once the lines and spaces began conversing, then color would finally start to speak. And the flat would gradually transform into the three-dimensional. What I had to do was encourage them all, lend them a hand. And more than anything, not get in their way.

Murakami also seems to be mocking those who would take his metaphors too literally: So many of his books feature a mysterious pit or well, as does this one, and when the narrator attempts to paint it, he realises that it looks like a vagina from a distance – and then laughs at the idea that anyone might read a Freudian hidden meaning into his painting. (Yet eventually, this narrator will be forced to make his way through a dark and narrowing passageway until he experiences something like rebirth. But don't read anything into that.) *And another note: I have read that this is meant as a “loving homage to The Great Gatsby”, but I don't really get that.

I felt the rush of owl wings, and heard a bell ring in the dark.
Everything was connected somewhere.

Like the Little People from 1Q84 or the talking sheepmen from Dance Dance Dance, the most uncanny part of this book for me was an unreal character who can appear from nowhere and seems to read the narrator's mind; I feel like I've read it before, the menace seems entirely in my own head, but I completely connect with these images, they fascinate me. I totally appreciate that it takes a particular literary taste to be so intrigued by what Murakami puts out there, but this is exactly what I like.