Review: Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I have read most of Murakami’s work by this point, and all of the would-be masterpieces: Kafka at the Shore, 1Q84, Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, and Hardboiled Wonderland. I obviously enjoy the guy’s work, or I wouldn’t keep coming back to him, and I am as excited as anybody else at this newest bid for greatness.

On balance, I think this one delivers yet again. It’s got the familiar tropes of a main character who slowly sheds his all-around-nice-guy persona to reveal peculiar darknesses; a secondary world that may or may not be distinct from what we know everyday; sustained reflections on the nature of art in a world craving for certainty denied it; and even, though not until the end and then only in small bits, cats as totems.

The more I read this, though – and I believe it’s Murakami’s first to deal so extensively with painting – the more I began to see some parallels between Murakami and painters in general. Above all, I found myself thinking of Murakami as a kindred spirit to Marc Chagall. Both had a tendency to reuse mystical tropes, and both worked on either medium-sized or vast canvasses. Both eschewed strict realism but neither embraced anything like full-blown abstraction.

Thinking of Murakami in such a light made me realize that there may not be all that meaningful a difference between his works. That’s not criticism; it’s just an effort at explaining why a single writer has shown he can write at least five different novels sized to be career-defining works. What I’m suggesting is that Murakami is less about plot or arguments and more about arranging a variety of tropes, images, and motifs into ever-fresh ways. His imagination is so deep and his feel for balance so strong that the real question seems to be how a specific composition fits together.

In such a light, it may be that this is somewhat weaker than the other top Murakami’s. Still, I think I’ve felt that about each of them since Kafka at the Shore (which was the first I read). I’ll finish, decide it’s good but a little less good, and then, as I reflect on the whole of the novel in the following weeks. I’ll find it ultimately as satisfying as the others.

That’s certainly my experience here. In the midst of my deep enjoyment of the novel, I was looking for reasons to be skeptical. I was troubled by the inelegant telegraphing of our protagonist’s friend, the son of the great painter, who has some news about his involvement with the protagonist’s ex-wife. I was frustrated that the opening pages essentially reveal the final key images – the faceless man, the idea of portraiture, and the penguin charm of the little girl – and take away some of the joy of narrative suspense. And I was bothered that some major tropes seem to get introduced only late.

And yet, as I reflect on all of this, it’s not so much that those images and tropes are out of balance as that they are out of the balance I would have anticipated. As the novel comes into focus as a whole, I find myself appreciating all at once again that Murakami hasn’t merely recycled his old stand-bys; he has instead reappropriated them for this new literary canvas.

We get a few more explicit articulations than usual of the fundamental Murakami method. At one point, the mysterious Menshiki says, “Instead of a stable truth, I choose unstable possibilities,” and “I choose to surrender myself to that instability.” Our protagonist can’t quite embrace such uncertainty but – and this is the dimension of the novel in which he is like the Nick Carraway to Menshiki’s Gatsby – he does indeed go partway. He’s willing to accept that we can’t know truth entirely but that we have to embrace something. As he puts it near the very end, “Maybe nothing in this world can be certain, but at least we can believe in something.”

In the end, though, I’m less interested in why Murakami does what he does or even for why it works. Instead, I am happy to enjoy the peculiar blend of symbol, fantasy, and melancholy that he finds a way to paint in fresh fashion over one after another of his massive canvasses.


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