San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Beneath the surface
In Haruki Murakami’s new novel, an artist agrees to paint a portrait of his mysterious neighbor. The subject of the painting is rich but has no discernible income, and though he talks like a person on a metaphysical quest, it’s not clear what he’s after. “Sometimes in life we can’t grasp the boundary between reality and unreality,” he tells the artist one day. “That boundary always seems to be shifting.” This could serve as an epigraph for any number of Murakami’s books. Over a long career that has made him a leading Nobel Prize contender, the masterful Japanese writer has built an uncanny, thematically unified body of work. His global bestsellers — they include the eerie “Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World” and the beguiling “1Q84” — often focus on ordinary people who tumble into bizarre parallel worlds; once there, they’re confronted with existential dilemmas. Murakami is a wiz at melding the mundane with the surreal.
His latest slots in nicely alongside his previous work. Eccentric and intriguing, “Killing Commendatore” is the product of a singular imagination. This is Murakami, so it’s perfectly natural that there’s a talking painting and a portal to a quasi-earthly realm.
The portrait artist, who’s 36 and going through a divorce, is the main character and narrator. Though he never tells us his name, he makes it clear that he’s disillusioned with his work. It’s easy to see why. He spends his days churning out forgettable likenesses of Tokyo CEOs, who in turn use the paintings as tax write-offs. “In their accounts,” his agent explains, “a portrait isn’t included as a work of art but as office equipment.”
“Talk about heartwarming,” the portraitist re-
plies. He takes a professional time-out and retreats to a vacant house in rural Japan. Tomohiko Amada, an older and much more successful painter, once worked in a studio on the premises, but he’s since moved to a nursing home.
One day, the portraitist finds an overlooked Amada painting in the attic. Amada is esteemed to the point where each of his extant works is held by a museum or a gallery, so this is a noteworthy discovery. Why has this picture eluded the curators and collectors? The mystery only deepens when the portraitist divines the painting’s one-off nature. Amada spent his days painting pastoral scenes in muted colors. But the stashed picture — it’s titled “Killing Commendatore” — is a burst of harsh reds, bold greens and stark whites. It shows the bloody assassination of a military leader.
The painting, the portraitist comes to believe, is “a metaphorical confession” — during World War II, Amada was in Vienna, where he purportedly plotted a Nazi official’s murder. More interesting still, “Killing Commendatore” proves to be an unusually lifelike image. The human figures depicted on the canvas have a habit of materializing in three-dimensional form and talking to the portraitist. Their presence is baffling, but it begins to make sense when considered alongside the novel’s second major story line.
This other thread stems from the portraitist’s relationship with Mr. Menshiki, the neighbor who’s having his picture painted. Menshiki lives alone in a mansion near the portraitist’s new place, and early in the book, he makes a confession of his own: He’s been using binoculars to spy on a neighborhood
In this book and many that came before it, he urges us to embrace the unusual, accept the unpredictable.
girl named Mariye. Menshiki believes that his ex-girlfriend had their child without telling him, and that this child, Mariye, lives with her aunt nearby. Though Menshiki’s entire life — his departure from the city, his purchase of the mansion — is geared toward being near Mariye, he’s hesitant to approach her family. Which is why Menshiki sought out the portraitist in the first place. He intends to persuade his new acquaintance to invite Mariye and her aunt for a visit, during which Menshiki will drop by. He just wants to be in the same room with the girl he thinks is his daughter.
Mariye isn’t just a complementary character. A spirited preteen, she roams about the woods between her house and the portraitist’s. She knows something the adults are only starting to realize: out there amid the evergreens, there’s a stone pit that seems to be a passageway to a parallel reality, one where you can fix mistakes made in this dimension. The pit isn’t totally secret, though — the figures who spring to life from Amada’s “Killing Commendatore” canvas have found it, too.
It’s all pretty daffy, even by Murakami’s standards, yet he has a way of imbuing the supernatural with uncommon urgency. His placid narrative voice belies the utter strangeness of his plot, and the story’s many idiosyncrasies come to feel reasonable and necessary. As much as he returns to certain tropes — alternate dimensions; despondent, mid-30s, male protagonists (see: “Hard-Boiled Wonderland,” “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage”) — his characters are always persuasively alive and vulnerable.
The book’s one shortcoming — an abundance of cliches — is something we’ve seen before from Murakami. “It didn’t ring a bell.” There’s “no use crying over spilt milk.” She read “like there was no tomorrow.” These are some of the many examples in “Killing Commendatore.” While those of us reading the English translation don’t know if these terms sound less hackneyed in Japanese, it’s nevertheless a drag to encounter such stale sentences.
But this book won’t be sunk by a bit of subpar prose. The worldview of Murakami’s novels is consistent, and it’s invigorating. In this book and many that came before it, he urges us to embrace the unusual, accept the unpredictable. “Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them,” he writes, and you can tell he loves it that way.
Kevin Canfield has written for Bookforum, Film Comment and other publications. Email: books@sfchronicle.com