Self-indulgence merited
Ispent at least 15 long years thinking I didn’t like the novels of Haruki Murakami, after I attempted to read Norwegian Wood and hated it so much I returned it to the library unfinished. But after I heard him speak at the Auckland Readers and Writers Festival a few years ago, I thought I should give him another chance. This didn’t happen until I stayed at the Book and Bed hostel in Toyko, where you sleep in bookshelves.
There I picked up his 1973 debut novella, Pinball and loved it. Next I read Kafka on the Shore and loved it even more. I then dived straight into his latest novel. Murakami’s “every man” protagonists are so similar that continuing on directly with Killing Commendatore felt like a natural progression.
And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. There’s something comforting about the familiarity of his prose and despite the simplicity of his language, the themes are still very complex without being ostentatious.
This latest is a surreal ode to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and is a hefty tome that contains a hell of a lot more yearning than its inspiration, which has been an obsession of Murakami’s for many years. Killing Commendatore follows an unnamed artist in his mid-30s, who has found some success painting portraits of wealthy businessmen, while he longs for a more meaningful practice.
After his wife leaves him, he drives aimlessly around Japan before a friend offers him a place to stay in the former mountain home of his father — a famous traditional Japanese painter, now on death’s door in a rest home. While our hero has given up painting portraits for pay, he quickly becomes tied up with his mysterious and wealthy neighbour, Wataru Menshiki, who commissions a portrait — in any style — for a large amount of money.
As you’d expect, there’s a healthy dose of magic realism, as a character from a forgotten painting comes to life while a haunting bell rings unexplainably from a shrine in the back of the woods. Menshiki obsesses about a girl, who may or may not be his daughter, watching her with military-grade binoculars from across the mountains.
As is often the case in Murakami’s work, the descriptions of women’s bodies can become disturbing; here, it’s the time spent dwelling on the aforementioned girl’s breasts (or lack thereof). But what I liked the most in this novel were the descriptions of the process of painting and the mid-life crisis of an artist who rediscovers his work through a series of strange encounters. Overall, I enjoyed Killing Commendatore but it drags on a bit and could have been condensed. However, I suppose, Murakami is at the stage in his career where he feels he can get away with being a little selfindulgent in his work.