The Japanese novelist’s latest book, “Killing Commendatore,” features a stymied artist, a haunted painting and a host of paranormal mysteries.
KILLING COMMENDATORE
By Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen
681 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $30.
“We’d lived under the same roof for six years, yet I knew next to nothing about this woman,” explains the narrator of “Killing Commendatore,” Haruki Murakami’s overlong and somewhat undercooked tale of supernatural happenings in rural Japan. He’s talking about his wife, whose decision to divorce him has precipitated his flight from Tokyo to the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, where he is staying in a house that once belonged to a famous painter. Over the course of Murakami’s 17 previous books of fiction, readers have become familiar with “Murakami man,” a listless, socially isolated guy whose interests tend to circle around music, books, home cooking and cats, and whose lack of anchor in the everyday world often precipitates a sort of slippage into a netherworld of ghosts and spirits. In “Killing Commendatore,” this man is a portrait painter who makes a living from commissions but has no deep connection to the work he makes. By contrast, Tomohiko Amada, the painter whose house he’s renting, was a major artist, who turned from Western-style “cutting-edge modern oil paintings” to Japanese-style work after getting involved in an abortive political assassination as a student in 1930s Vienna. He is now in a nursing home, suffering from dementia.
After a period of “producing nothingness,” listening to Amada’s collection of classical LPs and conducting an emotionally uninvolving affair with a local married woman, the narrator finds one of Amada’s paintings rolled up in the attic. It turns out to be a representation of a scene in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” with the characters dressed in the style of seventh-century Japanese courtiers. In the opera, Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, who is the father of a woman he has attempted to seduce, after the old man tries to block his escape from the family house. This depiction of the murder, the narrator says, has “something that shook the viewer to the core.” “There is,” he adds bathetically, “something very special about this painting.”
Amada’s decision to represent a scene from a pillar of the Western canon in a classical Japanese style seems not unconnected with Murakami’s own commitments as a reader and translator of Carver, Fitzgerald and other American writers. Murakami’s low-key cool owes much to his love of American jazz, and his playfulness and absurdism often bring to mind Vonnegut and Brautigan, who were popular among his generation of countercultural Japanese. Japanese audiences have bought millions of his books, despite critics grumbling about his Western touchstones, an attitude exemplified by Kenzaburo Oe’s sniffy remark that Murakami’s writing “isn’t really Japanese.
