Killing Commendatore

“But you know, it seems to me that reality itself has a screw loose somewhere. That's why I try to keep at least myself in line as much as possible.”

It's been four years since the English translation of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013), a welcome addition to Murakami's oeuvre. It was a sort of anti-1Q84: tightly edited and rooted more in the everyday than the magical. Now Murakami is back with another heavy tome, and while it's not exactly 1Q84-length, at 704 pages it's almost the length of Colorless Tsuku Tazaki and Kafka on the Shore combined.

It's vintage Murakami. There's always something lurking under the surface of the mundane, each moment a possible trigger for strange events. And, since this is Murakami, you know that sooner or later this stranger realm penetrates the one we're inhabiting. Murakami is so good at this that even when the watershed moment comes, he's able to readjust us in the narrative to accommodate basically anything he throws at us. A bit like David Lynch, but perhaps more nuanced in the sense that in Murakami, he actually more easily inhabit the world and it makes sense to us.

So it is that for me, Murakami's greatest achievement is the strong ambience he's able to create. You can touch and smell within the narrative itself.[1] One of my favorite moments of terror is in 1Q84 and involves a hideout apartment and reading In Search of Lost Time. There are many such quality moments in Killing Commendatore. Add to this his lovely sense of humor,[2] which surfaces at times, and you've got a recipe for a hugely enjoyable read.

But just as Murakami at his best takes us to great places, I think he gets such a rollercoaster ride going that ultimately I always find his endings lacking, a bit like some of my encounters with Terry Pratchett, where the journey is so great that when the end approaches, there's something lacking when he has to grind it to a halt. This was my greatest problem with 1Q84, and something that a less ambitious work as Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki avoided. From what I can remember, Kafka on the Shore found a sweet balance.

I wasn't quite as invested in the endgame as I would have liked, either. He takes a leaf out of Dante's book, and while I completely respect this decision in the context of the creative process and its description, that's one moment where I felt the narrative turned on the autopilot and merely sailed home without further ado. And, gosh, is everyone in the book obsessed with what Lorelai Gilmore would term ”breastage”.

Since I'm incapable of reading it in the original, I read the English translation. I wonder if it was merely my own projection, knowing there were two translators, but I felt the style changed dramatically especially during the first quarter of the book. It would be interesting to know from someone fluent in Japanese whether any trace of this exists in the original.

I think that, on the whole, Killing Commendatore is a book I will gladly revisit in the future. Even now as I'm contemplating reading more Murakami, I'm really drawn to rereading 1Q84, never mind that it somewhat epitomizes the traits I find tiresome in Commendatore, too. In short, Murakami is such an original voice in contemporary fiction that he has yet to leave me cold.

Endnotes:

[1] ”In the silence of the woods it felt like I could hear the passage of time, of life passing by. One person leaves, another appears. A thought flits away and another takes its place. One image bids farewell and another one appears on the scene. As the days piled up, I wore out, too, and was remade. Nothing stayed still. And time was lost. Behind me, time became dead grains of sand, which one after another gave way and vanished. I just sat there in front of the hole, listening to the sound of time dying.”

[2] ”The mansion was surrounded by a high white wall, with a solid gate in front. Large wooden double doors painted a dark brown. Like the castle gate in an Akira Kurosawa film set in the Middle Ages. The kind that would look good with a couple of arrows embedded in it.”

20 March,
2019