Review by New York Times Review
"WE'D LIVED under the same roof for six years, yeti 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 1930 s 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.... It could be read very naturally in New York." This is true only up to a point. The 18th-century ghost stories of Ueda Akinari (most familiar outside Japan through Mizoguchi's 1953 film "Ugetsu") and the demonological compendiums of Toriyama Sekien hover in the background of "Killing Commendatore," as they do in so much contemporary Japanese horror and fantasy, notably the anime of Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro"). Though "Killing Commendatore" does not address authenticity in specifically national-cultural terms, the novel is preoccupied with the possibility of making art infused with depth or spirit. The mechanical painter of commissioned portraits comes under the influence of the man whose house he's living in, and is moved to make works with real expressive power. "What I'd created was, at heart, a painting I'd done for my own sake." The novel offers some promising mysteries. The catalyst for the narrator's artistic renaissance is a reclusive businessman who is hiding out in the mountains to be near a 13-year-old girl he believes to be his daughter. A persistent ringing sound is coming from beneath a cairn of stones in the woods behind the house, and may be connected to an ancient Buddhist practice in which meditating monks had themselves entombed alive. The narrator and his neighbor remove the stones and open up a pit, which becomes a familiar Murakamiesque location, a liminal space between worlds. Amada's painting and Mozart's opera become part of a tangled net of references and symbols. As historical secrets and hauntings begin to pile on top of one another, one has the sense of a writer throwing a lot of ideas against a wall in the hope that something will stick. The plot is full of melodramatic bustle, but its wheels spin without gaining much traction. This is partly a result of Murakami's customary detachment. Faced with the supernatural, Murakami man experiences no Lovecraftian challenge to the foundations of his sanity, no creeping sense of dread. Instead he reacts with mild concern and head-scratching curiosity. When the Commendatore from Amada's painting comes to life and begins speaking to the narrator, he is at first "frozen" but is soon chatting away happily, before lapsing into tiredness and concluding that "it felt like it had taken place in a dream." A state of dreamlike indeterminacy is perhaps the most consistent atmosphere in Murakami's fiction. In his best work, such as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," an examination of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria, the feeling of tumbling from bardo to bardo masks trauma and becomes a way to approach the willful forgetting of the postwar period. The low-key tone of Murakami's narrators, which in earlier books like "Norwegian Wood" scanned as hipster cool, has in recent years come to feel more like depersonalization and isolation, a malaise not unlike that associated with hikikomori, the young shut-ins who have become a symbol of contemporary spiritual crisis. In "Killing Commendatore," the narrator's dreaminess mainly feels unfocused, and a story that might have been engaging at 300 or 400 pages is drawn out to almost 700. This is a novel in which no character can go to meet a friend at a restaurant without a description of the route and the traffic conditions. In Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen's translation, Murakami's limitations as a prose writer are on uncomfortable display. The narrator enjoys listening to Mozart, Beethoven and other greats of the Germanic classical repertoire. "Their music was deep, amazing and gorgeous," he informs us, sounding like an online review. And what about the narrator's wife? In these 700 pages, we don't find out too much about her, or indeed about any of the women who float like shades through the novel. She is chiefly interesting to him because she reminds him of his younger sister, who died at the age of 12, when her breasts were just beginning to develop. He connects this loss to his "feeling akin to fear about women with larger than normal breasts." The neighbor's teenage daughter, the focus of much of the plot, is chiefly characterized by her preoccupation with her "budding breasts," whose size she frequently discusses. The doubling of the two pubescent girls, one dead, one alive, is apparently intended to be charming and poignant. "Killing Commendatore" is a baggy monster, a disappointment from a writer who has made much better work. As the narrator says, awkwardly, about one of his minor supernatural experiences: "That might have just been a piece of a fragmentary dream." A state of dreamlike indeterminacy is perhaps the most consistent atmosphere in Murakami's fiction. hari kunzru is the author, most recently, of the novel "White Tears."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 21, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* E. M. Forster began Howards End with the now-famous epigraph "Only connect." Writing nearly a century later, in his latest mind-expanding novel, Murakami says, "Everything connects somewhere." In the space between those statements lies the evolution of the novel from early twentieth-century modernist realism to the kind of genre-leaping metafiction practiced today by Murakami, David Mitchell, and others. And, yet, Forster's plea for the primacy of human relationships remains central to Murakami's work, even if, as happens here, those connections can sometimes be terrifying as well as life-sustaining. For Murakami, the journey to connecting often begins in a hole in the ground. As much of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997) takes place with the protagonist sitting in the bottom of a well, so the portrait-painter hero of this novel, recently abandoned by his wife, is jolted out of his lethargy by what he finds in a mysterious hole near his rental home on a mountaintop outside Tokyo. A mysteriously ringing bell alerts the narrator to the hole, which leads in turn to his discovery of a painting called Killing Commendatore, hidden in the attic of the house by the former resident, a famous Japanese painter. So far, reality has only slightly begun to bend, but the hairpin curves hit the reader as soon as a character from the painting, the murdered commendatore, appears as a two-foot-tall living person. From there, it's a long and winding road back to the hole and through a nightmare landscape bedeviled by mind-twisting Double Metaphors before the connection our hero seeks can be achieved. Murakami's multifaceted genius is expressed not only through his wide-ranging imagination but, even more important, through his ability to ground those imaginative flights in the bedrock realism of human experience. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The complexity of Murakami's fiction would seem to preclude a mass readership, yet he is the most popular writer in Japan and a best-seller throughout the world.--Bill Ott Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Murakami's latest (following Men Without Women) is a meticulous yet gripping novel whose escalating surreal tone complements the author's tight focus on the domestic and the mundane. The unnamed narrator, a talented but unambitious portrait-painter in Tokyo, discovers his wife is having an affair, quits painting, and embarks on a meandering road trip. The narrator's friend offers to let him stay in the home of his father, Tomohiko Amada, a famous, now-senile painter whose difficult secret from 1930s Vienna unfurls over the course of the book. Once situated on the quiet, mysterious mountainside outside Odawara, the narrator begins teaching painting classes and finds a hidden, violent painting of Amada's in the attic called Killing Commendatore, an allegorical adaptation of Don Giovanni. He begins two affairs-one with an older woman who sparks the novel whenever she appears-and is commissioned by the enigmatic Mr. Menshiki to paint his portrait. Menshiki is preoccupied with a 13-year-old girl named Mariye-an intriguing character, but one whom the book has an unfortunate tendency to sexualize. At night, the narrator is haunted by a ringing bell coming from a covered pit near his house. This eventually leads him to a magical realm that includes impish physical manifestations of ideas and metaphors. His discovery provokes a pivotal, satisfying moment in his artistic development on the way to a protracted, mystic denouement. The story never rushes, relishing digressions into Bruce Springsteen, the simple pleasures of freshly cooked fish, and the way artists sketch. As the narrator uncovers his talents, the reading experience becomes more propulsive. Murakami's sense of humor helps balance the otherworldly and the prosaic, making this a consistently rewarding novel. 250,000-copy announced first printing. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
Relatively early on in this latest novel from -internationally renowned Murakami (IQ84), the main character states, regarding his current situation, "It was like trying to put together a puzzle that was missing some pieces." The feeling is much the same for the reader, but, in this case, putting together the pieces is delightful fun. Strange things begin to happen to our nameless narrator shortly after he moves into the home of a famous artist and stumbles upon a painting hidden in the attic. Recently divorced and with no real plans, he slowly realizes that uncovering the work may have been a mistake. As the novel unfolds, he's introduced to his Gatsby-like neighbor, begins hearing a mysterious ringing bell, finds a menacing pit in the woods, meets a precocious 13-year-old girl, and is visited by a two-foot-tall physical manifestation of an idea (more than one, actually). The connections to these events are eventually made somewhat clear as the work progresses. While readers are kept guessing at what it all means, Murakami takes his time, slyly amusing us as he goes along. Verdict Those familiar with the author's inventive writing will certainly devour this, as will readers seeking challenging and thoughtful fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 4/30/18.]-Stephen Schmidt, Greenwich Lib., CT © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Murakami (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, 2014, etc.) returns with a sprawling epic of art, dislocation, and secrets.As usual with Murakami, the protagonist of his latest, a long and looping yarn, does not bear a name, at least one that we know. As usual, he is an artist at loose ends, here because his wife has decided to move on. And for good reason, for, as he confesses, he has never been able to tell her "that her eyes reminded me so much of my sister who'd died at twelve, and that that was the main reason I'd been attracted to her." A girl of about the same age haunts these pages, one who is obsessed with the smallness of her breasts and worries that she will never grow to womanhoodand for good reason, too, since she's happened into an otherworld that may remind some readers of the labyrinthine depths of Murakami's 1Q84. Dejected artist meets disappeared girl in a hinterland populated by an elusive tech entrepreneur, an ancient painter, a mysterious pit, and a work of art whose figures come to life, one of them "a little old man no more than two feet tall" who "wore white garments from a bygone age and carried a tiny sword at his waist." That figure, we learn, is the Commendatore of the title, a character from the Italian Renaissance translated into samurai-era Japan as an Idea, with a capital I, whose metaphorical status does not prevent him from coming to a bad end. The story requires its players to work their ways through mazes and moments of history that some would rather forgetincluding, here, the destruction of Nanjing during World War II. Art, ideas, and history are one thing, but impregnation via metempsychosis is quite another; even by Murakami's standards, that part of this constantly challenging storyline requires heroic suspension of disbelief on the reader's part.Altogether bizarreand pleasingly beguiling, if demanding. Not the book for readers new to Murakami but likely to satisfy longtime fans. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
