Name: Killing Commendatore
Rating: 3.870860927152318 (151 reviews)
ISBN: 9780525520047

Haruki Murakami

"The much-anticipated new novel from the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore is an epic tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art--as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby--and a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers"--

Killing Commendatore

ikkychan

Whenever I got my hands on a Murakami novel, a strong sense of déjà vu would permeate from every page as I jumped from chapter to chapter. The recurring theme of nameless protagonist, unexplainable vanishing, old music records, random appearance of cooking show, precocious teenager, unbearable urban ennui, even down to weird sex and dichotomy of women more often than not would present repeatedly inside his narratives that you could just prepare a bingo sheet and see how many line you can get by the end of your reading. Sure, each book has a particular distinctive plot point that could deter its redundancy —like “Kafka on the Shore” and its strong oedipal curse or surreal exploration of parallel worlds in “1Q84” — but when you get to the nth book, like “Killing Commendatore”, you begin to sit down and deliberate whether another Murakami book is worth reading or not. This book recounts a story of a nameless protagonist — an inconspicuous yet reliable portrait painter — who had just broken the threshold of the most unfortunate chapter of his life: divorce. (But I can’t intervene; it’s a canon event!) However, just like most Murakami characters, our protagonist lack the basic skill of communication and instead of sitting down and talk about what happened between him and his wife Yuzu that led their marriage to an abrupt end, he just stood up, packed what he can grab, closed the front door and whizzed away in his Toyota-Corolla. After months of aimless wandering, his college friend Masahiko Amada offered him to reside in his father, Tomohiko Amada’s empty house in a mountainous region outside Odawara. With the help of an eccentric tycoon Menshiki Wataru, a precocious teenager (aha!) Mariye Akikawa with her voluptuous aunt Shoko Akikawa and an enigmatic fresh-from-painting Commendatore, our protagonist was caught in the whirlpool of inexplicable events full of tangents and turns in an arduous journey of self-discovery. The theme of tortured artists has been perpetuated throughout the ages by the means of various branches of art; like Sylvia Plath in literature, Kurt Cobain in songwriting, or Vincent Van Gogh and Edward Munch in painting, and later in this book, was reflected through the portraits of Tomohiko Amada and the nameless protagonist as two painters who have faced horrendous, catastrophic events which further altered their view of life and, consequently, the way they paint. When he was a prominent art student in Vienna, Tomohiko Amada was well-known for his modernist abstract painting, which was heavily influenced by Cubism. Having graduated from Tokyo Fine Arts School (later Tokyo University of the Arts), he then studied abroad to enhance his Western painting style in Vienna from the end of 1936 to the beginning of 1939. Unbeknownst to him, this was where he reached the tipping point of his life, when the two people who were the closest to him — his unnamed girlfriend and his younger brother, Tsuguhiko Amada — had both succumbed to an untimely, tragic demise. Unable to avoid enlistment, his delicate and sensitive younger brother was conscripted into the Japanese troops in Nanjing, implying his likely involvement in the Nanjing Massacre. Suffering from terrible PTSD of having killed countless lives with his hands, he decided to kill himself not long after his return to Japan. Completely devastated from the news, Tomohiko made the deliberate choice to stand against the political power of Germany and joined a guerilla resistance group with his girlfriend, carried out an assassination plan to kill a German higher-up, the plan that was prematurely exposed and resulted in his girlfriend’s execution and his abrupt return to Japan. After a period of silence, he made a comeback in the art world with a distinctly contrasting style to his old technique. He began to paint scenes of ancient Japan as the Asuka period, especially and the Heian and Kamakura periods, depicting realistic scenery and flowers — a Japanese painting through and through. One would not take a look at his painting and realize he has painted Cubism art before, for he didn’t leave a shred of his quondam vocation. The same goes with our nameless protagonist, who was left an empty shell of his former self when he found out that his wife was involved in an affair with another, more handsome man and chose to separate herself from him. He went out of the door without saying another word to Yuzu, quit painting and embarked on a months-long road trip, spanning from Hokkaido in the north to the Tohoku region in the south. During this unanchored meandering, he stopped at a diner in an unspecified seaside town and encountered a nervous woman who gave an impression of being followed by an unknown man, who later the protagonist nicknamed "The Man with the White Subaru Forester”. Under the woman’s pestering and demand, the protagonist was compelled to follow the woman to a nearby cheap inn and proceed to have a violent, intense sex — an event that still haunts the protagonist way after he left the area. Not only because of the abnormal night that he just had, but also the moment he stepped out of the inn to grab some coffee in the diner the morning after, he locked eyes with the man with the white Subaru Forester, who replied his look with a hateful glare, as if wanting the protagonist to know that he was aware of what he and the woman had done in the inn and with a mixture of sorrow and fury, he judged him for it. The protagonist couldn’t look past it no matter how much time has passed. The humiliation he felt, the bizarre feeling of being stripped naked and shamed by a mere yet intimidating stranger, coupled with the emptiness and the intense sense of grief of having been abandoned by Yuzu (he may be the one who leaves the house, but Yuzu did turn her back on him first) incited a howling cacophony that disorients his perception of self. He might have been perceived as calm as a cucumber from the way he cooks his lunches, the way he talks to the people around him, or discusses old opera record with Menshiki — but beneath those placidity and tranquil manner lays an absolute mental turmoil, a complete psychological chaos, an extreme inner turbulence and all of them were reflected in his more recent artworks like ‘Portrait of Wataru Menshiki’, ‘The Man with the White Subaru Forester’, ‘The Pit in the Ground’ and ‘Portrait of Mariye Akikawa’ which primarily captured not only the likeness of its subject but the soul within them, the core essence of their existence, laying bare their personal truth on the canvas, just like what The Man with the White Subaru Forester did to the protagonist. This transformation in both Tomohiko Amada’s and nameless protagonist’s painting style represents the shift in their worldview, showing how different their realities were before and after the catastrophic incident that they have had to brace. They might not have a particularly stellar reputation before or their paintings always lack a certain something, a distinct quality that renders their artworks bordering on mediocrity. However, that soon changes as the constant state of torments, which apparently become their latest way of living, further enriches their art and proliferates their creativity, allowing them to ingrain that missing spark of greatness they couldn’t manage to perceive before and let the whole world marvel at these new-found geniuses. According to the ‘tortured artist’ ideal, being a great mind requires suffering; a trope that is teetering on toxicity as this notion could lead to an unintended drawback as one would purposefully exacerbate their non-existent predicament to the point of harming oneself or others in the pursuit of art — as demonstrated by Nina Sayers in ‘Black Swan’ or Andrew Nieman in ‘Whiplash’. As I perceive it, Murakami novels are the tales of lonely, detached, quite possibly depressed individuals who, according to societal norms, were compelled to suppress their emotions in order to maintain a facade of composure. This calmness only masks the storm that is brewing underneath it, causing a warp in reality where the protagonist would experience things, highly unusual things, that could not be explained with common sense simply because their inner struggle is far from common. As depicted in ‘Killing Commendatore’, the strange occurrences around the nameless protagonist — the rings of the bell in the middle of the night, the appearance of the Commendatore, the run-in with Long Face, the journey into the metaphorical underground — are further representation of the overwhelming emotional unrest that he hide deep under his appearance of poise and self-possession. Be it nothing but hallucination or actual glitch in the matrix, you can’t deny the fact that the significant disparity between the serenity of daily life and the dark surreality of the parallel world is extremely uncanny. Sure, these contradictions are what intrigue me about his books, but I personally feel that there is something wrong (with me? Or the book? Or both?) If those contradictions — the tropes, the recurring themes, the whole bingo sheet set, you may say — start to provide me comfort instead of arousing my curiosity and fascination.

It was my first Murakami book, and I remember being hooked instantly. I didn't want to finish it quickly, I just wanted to live in it for as long as I could. I wanted to be in that world, to smell the air of the mountain, and fresh paint. I wanted to walk around the scenes, and talk to the characters.

Picked up to read it again years later, and already feel the same vibe. It'll be great to relive it.

eryc

It was my first Murakami book, and I remember being hooked instantly. I didn't want to finish it quickly, I just wanted to live in it for as long as I could. I wanted to be in that world, to smell the air of the mountain, and fresh paint. I wanted to walk around the scenes, and talk to the characters.

Picked up to read it again years later, and already feel the same vibe. It'll be great to relive it.

Eva Ströberg

Wow! What a book! A must read for Murakami fans

Mina

My first Murakami book and it was a good one, from the writing to the imagery to the themes the book explored.

jess

Every so often, I need my Murakami medicine. This unadulterated hit really scratched that itch. 

Frederik De Bosschere

altlovesbooks

"None of us are ever finished. Everyone is always a work in progress."

I enjoyed this book a lot, as I do most of Murakami's stuff. While I was expecting a more conclusive ending (not sure why, as most of his stuff is interpretative rather than conclusive), I enjoyed how imperfect all the characters were. Murakami spent a lot of time talking about breasts, but he does in all his books so it wasn't entirely unexpected. I can see where it would turn people off, though.

Fernando Bolaños

** spoiler alert **
           I’m a fan of Murakami’s work, but this one wasn’t his best. The plot and the characters were interesting and classic. However it could have been more concise, many things felt repetitive. Also there’s a limit on how the description of a thirteen year old’s chest is crucial to the plot, we got it on the first three times it’s mentioned, please stop!

Allison

I got so far along and couldn’t bring myself to give up on it. The story was very repetitive and kind of boring , but the mysterious characters kept me interested enough to want to finish.

Finn Salter

I don’t know if my taste is just getting bad but I could barely get through this book.

Theodore William Goossen

Philip Gabriel

A publishing event: a major new, epic novel from the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of 1Q84 and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage. A thirty-something portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife and finds himself holed up in the mountain home of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. When he discovers a previously unseen painting in the attic, he unintentionally opens a circle of mysterious circumstances. To close it, he must complete a journey that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a two-foot-high physical manifestation of an Idea, a dapper businessman who lives across the valley, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt during World War II in Vienna, a pit in the woods behind the artist's home, and an underworld haunted by Double Metaphors. A tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art--as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby--Killing Commendatore is a stunning work of imagination from one of our greatest writers.

A Novel

Lee Schneider

Good moments. Fun for fans. Weaker than his other books. The wandering storyline technique that worked so well in others doesn't serve here. 

Quite frankly, this book was stunning. 

It was very, very difficult to put down as soon as I've started. On its own, it's clearly a masterpiece, and a culmination of many years of experience as a celebrated author. 

I also especially love reading fiction with protagonists who are artists, or who are devoted to the arts. So this book hit a lot of the right notes for me. I thoroughly, thoroughly enjoyed it.

But.

I can't give it five stars. I know, the author almost definitely cares about my feedback here (sarcasm). But I'm trying to be more conscious about my reactions to media, so it's important for me to suss out my instinctive reactions to what I am reading here. There are two things that are bothering me. I'm not really good at this "review" thing — this is basically meant just for me to gather my thoughts in one place, and probably no one will specifically be reading this anyway. I'll do my best to enumerate why I'm just a bit bothered.

Women
I have also read 1Q84, the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, after dark, and probably something else I'm forgetting right now. What I mean to say is: this isn't my first Murakami rodeo. 

Something that just really, really bothers me about the women in his works is that none of them are allowed to just be normal women. I'm putting this point first because I'm trying to explain a deeper, more ineffable discomfort I have with reading the depiction of women in his books. Like, it's fine. He's not calling me and asking me for his advice. So whatever, right? But it just feels like, every single woman, from the youngest to the oldest one just have to be enigmas for the POV character — who is 9 times out of 10 male in his books, as far as I know — to try and suss out. For his own character development. Like it's definitely some new, interesting, original evolution on the whole manic pixie dream girl trope. In his books there are plenty o' dudes who are just allowed to be themselves, like just normal guys that the main character may talk to. There are PLENTY of weird, eccentric, enigmas of men too, but it just seems like that's the rule for ALL WOMEN in his universes. The women are not allowed to not be enigmas, puzzles, part of some mysterious and evolutionary journey that the MC is going on. From the twelve year old Mariye to the dead twelve year old Komi all the way to the oldest women in this book, through the entire cast of female characters we see in this book, it's the same damn thing. I really don't know why.

The Rape of Nanjing

Okay so as someone who has read Iris Chang's Rape of Nanking and learned about the rape of Nanjing through some of my own older family members' accounts — is it not fucking WEIRD how Nanjing is referenced in his work? I'm framing this as a question rhetorically. I know its weird. 

I may be coming from a certain perspective due to where I am — immersed in the Chinese community around my hometown and my university — that anything other than full acknowledgement of the atrocities committed is a heinous way of representing the events. Like, if you are GOING to represent the rape of Nanjing, to do so in a manner that deviates from historical facts does a disservices to the legacies of the victims who are still fighting for the acknowledgement of those war crimes by the Japanese government. 

So disclaimer: as it's in a book by a Japanese author, it's probably huge that the rape of Nanking is acknowledged in any way at all, because of how problematized the narratives of those wartime atrocities are in Japanese politics and society even to this day. So I am bearing that in mind as I am reading this work, and I am definitely not trying to call Murakami out as a terrible horrible person.

At the same time though...no spoilers, but the events at Nanjing play a role in one of the key character's family's backstories, because one of his family-members was a soldier who took part in the invasion, occupation, and atrocities at Nanjing during the Japanese invasion of China. Here are the excerpts where he's specifically addressing the historical facts of what occurred:




Okay. So. He is retelling the events because he's talking about the psychological impact the events in Nanjing had upon a soldier that went there, who wasn't meant to have become a soldier. As a musician, he was supposed to have been excused from the war by his wealthy family, but his paperwork was fucked and he was shipped off to war and made to fight at Nanjing.

So he's already trying to illustrate: the war was hell for him. He took his own life after experiencing Nanjing from the POV of a soldier invading and occupying the city.

So then, why not mention at all any of the horrific atrocities that occurred through the retelling? The women who were raped by the hundreds, pregnant women disemboweled by the Japanese soldiers for sport, civilians who were buried in the mud up to their shoulders and then their heads kicked to death? Children made to watch as their mothers and grandmothers were raped, and then were raped afterward? A laundry list of human rights violations and unimaginable, horrifying torture. What I've listed is only the start. I would highly recommend, if you happen to be reading this review and haven't read Iris Chang's book, to please check it out. 

I don't want to have as his defense that it's "too much to ask of a Japanese author" because that would presume a certain ineluctability of this bias on his part just by his being Japanese, and I think that's a different kind of racism, perhaps. So I am holding him to account as I would hold any author of any ethnicity that, if he's going to invoke the rape of Nanjing, it's just really fucking weird to do it like this, to make it sound like any other battle by dancing around the specific atrocities committed by Japanese soldiers using euphemistic terms like "a massive number of noncombatants were sucked into the conflict and lost their lives" for the rape, slaughter, and butchering of civilians that took place.

I mean, we have to hold Murakami to account simply because his work reaches such a wide audience throughout the world. Iris Chang didn't go through the horrific process of documenting the Rape of Nanking in her incredible book, didn't make the interview subjects relive their trauma again and again, so that a widely read, stellar work of art like this could then spread the wrong impression of the "massacre" there, make it seem like just everyday war violence. No?

And this would help his point! Of how traumatizing it must have been for a conscripted soldier to look on as these atrocities took place! Of how fucked it would have been for his commanding officers to be ordering him to carry these things out! So it would make perfect sense for there to be at least passing mention of that in the summary of the events. But the summary given in the book just makes absolutely ordinary the scale of evil and butchery that took place in Nanjing. It's just not good practice as a writer. It's unconscionable to me as a Chinese-American.

So yeah. I guess I just wanted to tell everyone who's looking through all the reviews for this book: keep this in mind even as you read.

Sloan, Kara

Definitely not what I was hoping for having read a few of Murakami's other works. VERY slow, not nearly as other-worldly, and incredibly repetitive. I'm not sure the intent was for us to feel as aimless and bored with life as the main character or not, but it took the full first half of the book to even get somewhat interesting, and even then, not much happened. Took a long time to get through cover to cover.

Liv Rockwell

Murakami pulls together prose, imagery, and the power of belief into this storyline. Through the story of a artist's time during a marriage break, Murakami explores the importance of belief. The things and ideas we believe in (although not visible) play such a large role in our actions and life's outcomes. In the mountainous landscape we see an artist come to terms with his beliefs about himself as a man and artist. We also see how others' perceptions and beliefs about their lives influence their actions.

This was my third Murakami novel. A thicker novel, you know that you're reading a long novel but it doesn't feel like you're trudging through it. As always, it left me wanting more Murkami, just maybe not immediately after. I need some processing time.

We all live our lives carrying secrets we cannot disclose. 'Beguiling... Murakami is brilliant at folding the humdrum alongside the supernatural; finding the magic that's nested in life's quotidian details' Guardian When a thirty-something portrait painter is abandoned by his wife, he holes up in the mountain home of a famous artist. The days drift by, spent painting, listening to music and drinking whiskey in the evenings. But then he discovers a strange painting in the attic and unintentionally begins a strange journey of self-discovery that involves a mysterious ringing bell, a precocious thirteen-year-old girl, a Nazi assassination attempt and a haunted underworld. A stunning work of imagination, Killing Commendatore is a surreal tale of love and loneliness, war and art.

Olivera Mitić

4.75/5🌟

Vau, al je ovo bilo putovanje. 

Ako bi nekome trebalo da prepričam ovu knjigu, nisam baš sigurna da bih se snašla. Zato to svakako neću ni da radim, već ću umesto toga malo pričati o nečemu drugom.

Ubistvo Komtura je najmurakamijevski Murkami koji sam do sada čitala. Imam utisak kao da je čovek dostigao neki meta level samosvesti pa nas sad sve kolektivno čika i namerno se igra sopstvenim klišeima. Dajte onu bingo tablu za sve tipične Murakami karakteristike, pa da izvučemo bingo bar 2-3 puta (neimenovani, pasivni sredovečni muškarac kao protagonista, klasična muzika, misteriozna predadolescentna devojčica, spremanje hrane, paralelni svetovi, neočekivani telefonski poziv, Čovek Bez Lica i tako dalje i tako dalje). 



Ovo je moj šesti roman ovog autora i njegova fikcija mi je, čini mi se, postala neka zona komfora. Vraćam mu se svaki put kad mi treba neko "utešno" čitanje u kojem okvirno znam šta me čeka i sa kakvim ću emocijama izaći iz knjige. Istovremeno, svako čitanje je i nostalgično i prijatno i vodi ka nekoj introspekciji. Znam da na kraju neću dobiti neki grandiozan rasplet od kojeg mi pada vilica, pa je tako slučaj bio i sa Komturom, ali to nikad i nije bila poenta sa delima ovog pisca. Prosto upadnete u njegove romane, pustite da vas vode gde vas već vode i uživate u onom konstantnom osećaju da samo što se nije desilo nešto veliko, kao što se i inače nekad osećate ovako, van književnosti. A kad sve to prođe i ispostavi se da se i jeste desilo 300 stvari, ali nijedna toliko zastrašujuća koliko ste mislili, bude vam okej da nastavite dalje isti kao i do sad, samo sa nekoliko iskustava više i tim jednim flaširanim periodom života o kojem ćete naknadno s vremena na vreme razmišljati. Eto, to je meni Murakami.

Killing Commendatore

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