The everyman at the heart of a Haruki Murakami novel is not just any everyman. He’s cooler—much. Hauntings, possessions, tunnels to and from the spirit realm (or is it the subconscious?), don’t ruffle him. Such indifference represented a departure from the Japanese canon when the translator-turned-novelist erupted onto the international scene in the 1990s. His parents were professors of Japanese literature—which, with all its romance and honor, bored him as a teenager in the 1960s. Now, many millions of international sales and dozens of unaccepted awards later, Murakami constitutes his own canon.
So minor deviations matter. And the protagonist of his new novel Killing Commendatore messes with the everyman mold in that he’s not got a very everymannish job: He’s an artist, a commercial portrait painter in his mid-30s seeking to do deeper, more expressive work. And he’s drawn, in the wake of his unexpected divorce (his wife tells him one morning that she got the idea to divorce him after six years from a dream, which she won’t recount to him) to return to his first painterly passion, abstraction.
An old art-school friend offers him his father Tomohiko Amada’s mountain retreat. Amada was a renowned 20th-century master of Japanese-style painting who had mysteriously abandoned Western modernism as a young man. He has been slowly succumbing to dementia in an old-folks home. Our narrator, the portraitist, listens to Amada’s classical records and stares at a blank canvas in Amada’s studio.
First he finds an unnervingly perfect painting by Amada tucked away in the attic, a Japanese-style scene of the grisly opening murder in Don Giovanni, in which the Don murders the powerful man—the Commendatore—who will haunt him. (The painting also depicts a failed Nazi assassination attempt, our hero learns—the reason Amada, a student in Vienna during the Anschluss, left the West and modernity behind.)
The narrator-painter hears the sound of a bell ringing each night, coming from the woods behind the house. And a strange but very wealthy voyeur watches him, from his gleaming modern mansion across the ravine, and then commissions a portrait just in time to lift him from his post-divorce funk: Till then, the inspiration wouldn’t flow. (The life story of this Gatsby-esque neighbor is one of the book’s slowly unspooling mysteries.) The painter and the neighbor seek out the source of the ringing; is it a summons to the underworld?
Killing Commendatore is a kind of play on the Murakami form, forging a middle path between his best loved domestic novels and the magical-realist epics critics hail. It’s also evidently toying with the influence of the American authors he translated, F. Scott Fitzgerald among them. The culture-melding painting the narrator finds in Amada’s attic has a power that Murakami, at his best, manifests: “Amada’s depiction of the two men’s violent duel to the death was something that shook the viewer to the core. The man who won, the man who lost. The man who stabbed and the man who was stabbed. My heart was captured by the discrepancy.” The master mixed East and West so profoundly, and so violently, that he opened a portal to the supernatural.
The journey toward resolution, true to Murakamian form, manifests in a fantastic yet matter-of-fact physical reality. Our narrator encounters an an “Idea” and a “Metaphor” embodied as cartoonish dwarves, characters plucked Amada’s painting. (They could have been plucked from the The Phantom Tollbooth.) The subconscious space-time tunnel, which Murakami readers will recognize, opens not just in dreams but in the physical floor—and always right on time.
In Mozart’s opera, the Commendatore’s murder opens a circle that closes with Don Giovanni’s comeuppance: The ghost of the Commendatore drags him to hell in the final scene, illustrating the impossibility of full, hedonistic freedom. The metaphor might give us a guide to the meaning of the otherworld our painter-protagonist will walk through, but that would be too generous. The ur-archetype is a tease. Just this once, might the master Murakami let his enchanted audience of millions in on the making of the mysterious?
A skilled and prolific but stylistically stunted commercial portraitist, haunted by campy manifestations of Don Giovanni characters as he found them portrayed in that hidden biographical turning point of a painting—it’s all a little too on the nose.
Nothing fits quite cleanly enough to be anything other than another enthrallingly impossible puzzle in the style his readers expect. The psychic knot of the artist’s divorce aching to be unwound, the peculiar and perhaps dangerous voyeur-muse across the ravine, the senile master’s metaphorically potent wartime plot and corresponding hidden painting—they fit together in a pattern only the novel’s maker knows.
The one certainty we’re left with is that there exists another, more powerful place—within us and all around us—invisible and only barely accessible to most people most of the time. It’s where artistic impulses, life-altering rifts and unions, births and deaths originate or at least go to gather meaning. There is just the one proven bridge, after all, between the arcane and the mundane, between the mysterious otherworlds of meaning and metaphor and the everyday realm where we live, cook dinner, play records, and put away books. Art, obviously.
