KILLING COMMENDATORE

HARUKI MURAKAMI

Trans. by PHILIP GABRIEL and TED GOOSSEN

Harvill Secker, 704pp, £20

The very name Murakami suggests a kind of book that no one else could write… and he seems to have pulled off his particular magic realism trick yet again with his 14th novel, Killing Commendatore. As Johanna Thomas-corr in the

Observer pointed out, the unnamed narrator is utterly Murakami-esque: ‘a gentle, irresolute, thirtysomething portrait artist for hire, “a stay-athome type” who suffers from Kafkaesque, claustrophobic nightmares and spends a lot of time parboiling vegetables’.

The other dominant character is the enigmatic and insular Menshiki of whom much has been made in relation to parallels with F Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby.

As James Marriott in the Times said: ‘So our narrator becomes mixed up with the mysterious billionaire who lives on the next mountain, a precocious 13-year-old girl and the titular Commendatore, who is a 2ft-high personified idea who appears in the form of a character from a painting. The billionaire thinks the 13-year-old girl might be his daughter and he commissions the narrator to paint her portrait so they can get to know her together.’ Christina Patterson of the Sunday

Times said of the Commendatore: ‘He’s charming. He’s chatty. And he has been watching “everything that happens”, including the narrator’s passionate sex with his married lover.

‘Yes, it’s all about as strange as you could get, and… it all becomes even stranger. The narrator gets sucked into a wild adventure, which involves a trip to a care home, a trip to the underworld and the near loss of his life. In the course of this adventure, there are recurring themes: his grief for the sister who died when she was 12, the darkness that lies in all of us, the boundary between reality and fantasy, and the price, and power, of art.’

Ultimately, Thomas-corr wouldn’t take Murakami too seriously: ‘Can our narrator escape the dreaded “Double Metaphor” in time to make a pasta sauce and listen to Thelonious Monk on vinyl?’

Xan Brooks in the Guardian agreed that Murakami’s plot is ‘thick with loose ends and cul de-sacs’ but in the end admitted, ‘His prose is warm, conversational and studded with quiet profundities. He’s eminently good company; that most precious of qualities that we look for in an author. We trust him to get us entertainingly lost, just as we trust that he’ll eventually get us home.’