Book review by Michael Isenberg.
Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Killing Commendatore, was released in English this month, following its Japanese premiere back in February.
I didn’t love it.
The episode figures into Murakami’s book in the form of a painting. The narrator—an artist of no real fame, whose name we never learn—has recently separated from his wife. A friend of his offers to let him stay at his father’s house in the mountains. The friend's father—a famous artist—is in the advanced stages of senility, confined to a nursing home, and therefore no longer able to reside in his now-empty mountain abode. The narrator takes his friend up on the offer. A short time after he takes up residence, he hears something moving in the attic and goes up to investigate. An owl, it turns out. But while he’s up there, he discovers a painting wrapped in paper and hidden away. It is labeled “Killing Commendatore” and despite its Japanese style, and the traditional Japanese garb of the figures in it, the scene and characters from Don Giovanni are readily identifiable.
The painting is an enigma. Clearly a masterpiece, why had the artist hidden it—alone among his works—from the eyes of the world? What meaning did it hold for him and did it have something to do with his involvement in a plot to assassinate a Nazi official in 1938 Vienna? And who is the grotesque figure poking his head through a trap door in one corner of the painting—the narrator calls him “Long Face”—the only character not recognizable from Mozart’s opera?
“Dragging a painting like that out into the light could well have been a mistake,” the narrator tells us. “By discovering it, I had set a cycle of some kind in motion.”
Such cycles are common in Murakami’s works and must be allowed to run their course. Before the circle is complete, the narrator is awoken by mysterious bells ringing in the night, discovers an underground chamber of unknown origin and purpose, and comes face-to-face with the Commendatore and Long Face—not as intimidating as it sounds, since they’re both about two feet tall, their actual sizes in the painting. Finally, his neighbor, the thirteen-year-old Mariye, goes missing. In order to save her, the narrator must journey through a bleak supernatural underworld, cross the River between Presence and Absence, and confront his lifelong fear of confined spaces.
All the elements we’ve come to expect from Murakami are there: classical music, food, astral projection, alternate dimensions, and finely crafted passages like this one:
Low patches of clouds hung over the surrounding mountains. When the wind blew, these cloud fragments, like some wandering spirits from the past, drifted uncertainly along the surface of the mountains, as if in search of lost memories. The pure white rain, like fine snow, silently swirled around on the wind.
Really makes me feel like I'm there. Or perhaps seeing it in a Japanese painting. In my imagination, a cello plays a mournful sonata.
With all of Murakami’s trademark elements in place—and I’m a fan of Murakami—I’m not sure why the book didn’t work for me. But I think a lot of it had to do with the narrator. I just wanted to slap him. Even before the trauma of learning his wife was sleeping with another a man, he was dead inside. “At some point in my life,” he tells us, “I had given up on new music. Instead, I listened to the old stuff over and over again. Books were the same. I reread books from my past, often more than once, but ignored books that had just come out. Somewhere along the way, time seemed to have come to a screeching halt.”
The screeching halt goes far beyond his tastes in music and literature. Although he has other relationships after he leaves his wife, and the sex is good, it all seems rather mechanical; he derives no joy from it that I can see. He is effete, unable to act. He mainly watches while the characters around him drive the story. He is aware that one of them might be using him, and although he should be resentful of that, he isn’t. “I remained, as ever, the impartial observer.”
Most significant of all, he is stunted artistically. Even while he was with his wife, he lived off commissions for the kind of formal portraits of company presidents found in board rooms. Not what he wanted to be doing, but it paid the bills. After he leaves her, he shows some promise of developing as an artist. But I don’t think it’s a spoiler to remind you that he describes the course of the story as a “cycle.”
Even the climactic journey through the underworld, with all its trials and ordeals, is ultimately pointless. It is never made clear how it did anything to help Mariye, who we eventually learn was never in any real danger. Maybe it’s more a journey of discovery for the narrator than a rescue mission for Mariye. But the narrator doesn't seem to have discovered anything.
It doesn’t help that the book is sloppily edited. There is at least one misspelling, a split infinitive, and some minor inconsistencies. At one point we’re told “Menshiki, I, and the Commendatore were seated at that large table,” followed two pages later by “The Commendatore finally made an appearance in the dining room, though not at the seat at the table prepared for him. Given his short stature, he would have only come up to nose level, hidden by the table. He plunked himself down on a kind of display shelf diagonally behind Menshiki.” Of greater concern, from an editing point of view, is the novel’s repetitiveness. The narrator tells us multiple times—each time as if it’s the first—that he’s separated, that he had a sister who died when she was Mariye’s age, that this, that, or another woman reminds him of her.
Killing Commendatore often seems profound. And yet, its profundity doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. The Commendatore tells us he’s an Idea incarnate. Sounds deep, but what idea is he? Freedom is an idea. Is he freedom? Marxism? Archimedes’ method for measuring specific gravity? Similarly Long Face is a metaphor, we’re told. A metaphor for what? We’re never told explicitly. As for the River between Presence and Absence, what is it that’s present, and what’s absent?
Maybe I just wasn’t bright enough to figure these things out. Or maybe I’ve outgrown Murakami. I hope that’s not the case. Despite Killing Commendatore, I’m still a fan.
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Check out Mike’s Nerds who Read review of Murakami’s 2004 novel After Dark, “Vignette Films get the Murakami treatment.”
Michael Isenberg drinks bourbon and writes novels. His latest book, The Thread of Reason, is a murder mystery that takes place in Baghdad in the year 1092, and tells the story of the conflict between science and shari’ah in medieval Islam. It is available on Amazon.com |
The 1990s were the age of vignette films: loosely connected collections of intersecting story lines. Notable examples were Pulp Fiction, Pret-a-Porter, and anything directed by Richard Linklater. The Simpsons even tried their hand at it, with the episode “22 Short Films about Springfield.”
