I Read Haruki Murakami’s ‘Killing Commendatore’.
At some point, I start to feel like a collection of my reviews for Murakami’s books will be called “The Murakami Dream Cliche.” I’ve now read my fourth book of his and each time, I find myself drifting to the “Description” sector of my brain towards the “feels like a dream” input. Each of them share that distinct quality of having a running beginning and then taking us to some version of an ending, not with “questions left unanswered” but instead the feeling that these shouldn’t have even been questions in the first place, instead a tacit understanding that these strange and unexplainable events and settings exist and we will have to accept that not all objects in the universe come with explicit descriptions of how and why they are.
Enter: Killing Commendatore.
The main character in this story goes through a divorce for exactly this reason. The woman he’s with simply decides “she just felt that they should no longer be together anymore.” And by the end of the book, we do get a resolution of this separation, but with no more heartfelt reason for the reconciliation than we get from their disengagement.
In this book we have a millionaire neighbor who has his sights set on a particular familial goal, we have a faceless stranger who enters into the protagonist’s life at strange intervals, we have a famous painter who has a vision that parallels but doesn’t cross over into our own, we have a pit, we have a shrine, we have a bell, we have an owl, we have a coverless novel… all of these things have storylines that open up, paragraphs (or pages or huge sections of the book) dedicated to these things and yet we get no sense of understanding them by the end anymore than we do while we are within their experience. Now. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so, necessarily. However, The Murakami Dream Cliche certainly does encompass all of these things well. And (for no better and for no worse) this is the reason that I read books of his and will continue to indulge in his library and my book-loving wife (five times more hungry for the written word, five times more adept at reading and even comprehending and retaining information) will continue to be annoyed by his output.
This book is steeped in metaphor. The hapless narrator in this story (yet another post-teen, mid-life, casual sort) is sort of having this just happen to him and he emotionlessly drifts through his own circumstances, accepting each and every causal turn that spins him in the direction down the river. It makes it easy for Murakami to engage in these wiles. It allows the things to occur to not be examined too intently by the characters within the book as we, instead, experience them in their purest form. We can draw our own conclusions by the end:
- What did the artist of Killing Commendatore portray in his painting? What did he see in his hotel room?
- Is the owl an owl?
- Was the pit put there on purpose? Was it destined for our narrator to intersect with it?
- Does the faceless man exist? Is his painting able to be completed?
There are so many more questions and tableaus that we are exposed to that we are required to put on our analytical brain to really engage with the book as it was meant to be experienced. The Dream Cliche allows us to take all of these double/triple layered contexts and make them into a whole different story, a whole spectrum of sensations that we can grab from. However, what makes these books so special is the fact that one can still read these books and take something from them while taking them at face value. We can still read the book and watch this person’s journey from divorce to an artistic retreat in a friend’s home that have some strange surrounding circumstances, to becoming entwined in the multifaceted exploits of his neighbors, to then coming full circle back to the city where he initially lived. Are there some supernatural and metaphysical breaks along the way? Sure, of course. But this still remains a fairly grounded book by nature of the lack of description or explanation of these phantasms and these talismans. And we can believe by the nature of the character’s go-with-the-flow nature that he didn’t need to ask questions about the hows and whys. He just carried on.
Similar to what I said about Ikonomou’s Good Will Come From the Sea, I wish I could have read this in the language that Murakami wrote in. In a way, there are some nice descriptions, but I don’t think this ever gives an author’s flare or flourish. This could very well be his style, regardless of language. But I think it feels that something is lacking. There are some really great descriptions of soft home living, from cooking, listening to records and the feeling of sitting down with a book. Those things are tough to really nail down and Murakami has it perfected. The sounds of car doors closing and the feeling of a familiar old couch are nearly impossible to specifically nail down without the acute observations he has.
I liked sitting with this book for many reasons and while I didn’t come out of it feeling immediately fulfilled, I did really enjoy sitting through some of the journey with the narrator. Entering into that strange world and allowing my mind to stretch a little bit was great, kind of like getting lost in a fractal screensaver. You can let your mind loose and just allow the waves to crash over you without worrying too much about what it all means. Truly, it means whatever you want it to mean.
