Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore was published in Japan in February last year. Early press releases for this English version hailed the book as ‘a tour de force of love and loneliness, war and art — as well as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby’. Anyone familiar with Murakami’s 17 preceding novels can vouch for love and loneliness as his great themes; and war, art and F. Scott Fitzgerald are not new to him, but in Commendatore all enrapture.
The narrator, a man with no name struggling with his own art — and, concurrently and inseparably, the women he sleeps with — recalls Murakami’s earlier nameless narrators, all the way back to Hear the Wind Sing (1979). A damaged, constant observer, he is also something of a Nick Carraway, while his neighbour across a rural mountain valley, the mysterious, wealthy Mr Menshiki in his shining solitary mansion, recalls Jay Gatsby.
The name Menshiki means colourlessness or the avoidance of colour, and from his house to his hair he is daisy-white. He has moved to this remote place because of a woman and a girl. Yet ‘loving homage’ in no way means a one-on-one correspondence. Neither longtime inspirations nor his own imagination fail Murakami here; Commendatore is a perfect balance of tradition and individual talent.
As well as Fitzgerald, William Faulkner is a guiding presence here, along with a host of other predecessors. The landscape in Commendatore is a Japanese Yoknapatawpha, where past and present, interior and exterior consciousness, and art and life in a recreational game with each other are the setting, the characters and the plot.
Murakami’s narrator, a successful but disaffected portraitist, realises as his marriage falters that he wants his art to show not smiling public faces but the skull, and the soul, beneath the skin. The ancient rural cottage he is borrowing belongs to a celebrated painter, Tomohiko Amada, who studied European painting in Vienna in the 1930s, fell in love with a woman who was later killed by the Nazis and escaped just in time to Japan.
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