Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami / A homage to Scott Fitzgerald’s classic is undone by too many narrative threads

A homage to Scott Fitzgerald’s classic is undone by too many narrative threads

Johanna Thomas-Corr
Sunday 7 October 2018

I

n 2006, Haruki Murakami, Japan’s superstar author, fulfilled one of his lifelong dreams. He didn’t win a huge literary award (Murakami actually withdrew his name from Sweden’s alternative to the Nobel shortlist last month, tired of the speculation). Nor did he achieve his ambition of sitting at the bottom of a well. But he did manage to translate The Great Gatsby into Japanese, something he had long ago vowed to do. It turns out F Scott Fitzgerald’s jazz age classic is not only Murakami’s long-held “infatuation” but the inspiration for his entire career. Which in itself sounds rather Gatsby-esque.

Like the lovestruck millionaire, Murakami clearly believes his own decades-old obsession needs a higher purpose. So his 14th novel is a 674-page homage to Fitzgerald’s most cherished book, a sprawling, surreal Gatsby for the information age. At 69, Murakami has probably spent far more time slaving over Gatsby than anyone – certainly more than Fitzgerald ever did. Killing Commendatore strips out all the bling-bling parties but retains the kernel of the tragic story about a lonely dreamer whose fantasies provide a “satisfactory hint of the unreality of reality”. The novel spins wide, exploring ideas about art, grief and rebirth with echoes of Alice in Wonderland, Don Giovanni, Bluebeard’s Castle and an 18th-century story by Ueda Akinari about a mummy who comes back to life. The result is an exhausting epic that is at once more absorbing than it deserves to be and less profound than the author intended.

‘Scatters ideas and references like windblown seeds’: Haruki Murakami outside Hans Christian Andersen’s house in Odense, Denmark.
Photograph: Ritzau Scanpix Denmark/Reuters

The unnamed narrator is a typical Murakami figure, a gentle, irresolute, thirtysomething portrait artist for hire, “a stay-at-home type” who suffers from Kafkaesque, claustrophobic nightmares and spends a lot of time parboiling vegetables. He leaves Tokyo when his wife calls an end to their marriage, resisting the temptation to admit that he only fell for her because she reminded him of his younger sister, who died aged 12.

After a meandering road trip, he winds up living in an empty house in the mountains belonging to his friend’s senile father, Tomohiko Amada, a famous painter. He’s soon distracted by the discovery of a violent painting of Amada’s in the attic called Killing Commendatore, an allegorical interpretation of Don Giovanni, as well as his chimerical neighbour, a tech baron called Walter Menshiki (which translates as “avoiding colours”). Menshiki is a scarily convincing 21st-century Gatsby, a neurotic autodidact with “sharp, raptor-like eyes”, “charming wrinkles” and hair that is “an almost obsessive white”. He lives a life of operatic loneliness and spends his money obtaining information about others while erasing Google entries about himself.

A man with powerful connections and swanky Jaguars, he’s secretly training his Nato-issue binoculars on a 13-year-old girl, possibly his daughter from an old affair, who lives on the mysterious mountainside opposite him.

It’s a tantalising premise. But then a bell starts ringing and a chatty little old man appears – at once the Commendatore and an “Idea” – and we are down a Murakami rabbit hole into an underworld “built upon the conjunction of phenomena and expression”. Can our narrator escape the dreaded “Double Metaphor” in time to make a pasta sauce and listen to Thelonious Monk on vinyl? Will Murakami ever tie up his metaphysical loose ends? Will it ever end?

“Nothing odd works long,” Martin Amis once said. What’s so confounding here is the way Murakami squanders his meticulous work in creating Menshiki to settle for his own authorly comfort zone. A purer homage to Gatsby would have been far more compelling, but Murakami likes to break his stories off at a crucial point. He scatters ideas and references like windblown seeds. You never know which narrative turn he will take next and you suspect he doesn’t either.

But perhaps the most unfortunate aspect of Killing Commendatore is a reminder of the author’s breast fetishism. I counted 80 mentions. Most are not-knowing-where-to-look gross and too many concern teenage girls’ chests that haven’t yet filled out. In the absence of anything more solid, this threatens to assert itself as the dominant theme of Murakami’s fiction.

• Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami is published by Harvill Secker (£20). 

THE GUARDIAN

Love / Christian Bale & Sibi Blazic

LOVE

Christian Bale & Sibi Blazic

Iman & David Bowie / That Something Called Love

Inside Melania Trump’s complicated White House life: Separate schedule, different priorities

According to several White House staff members, first lady Melania Trump has erected a de facto wall between the East Wing, where she is renovating her office and enjoying growing popularity, and the West Wing, where her husband works. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Inside Melania Trump’s

 complicated White House 

life: Separate schedule,

 different priorities

By Mary Jordan, Emily Heil and Josh Dawsey
May 6, 2018

Melania Trump appears to push president’s hand away

First lady Melania Trump appeared to brush the president’s hand away after he spoke in Tel Aviv on May 22. (Photo: Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)

Donald and Melania Trump’s remarkably separate daily routines begin with him getting up around 5:30 a.m., watching cable news shows and tweeting.

The first lady wakes in her own bedroom a bit later, according to two close friends of the Trumps. She then readies their 12-year-old son for school, including checking to make sure his homework is in his backpack.

NOW WHAT
First Lady Melania Trump observing her husband on the South Lawn of the White House last September.

By Pablo Martinez Monsivais/A.P. Images.

“SHE DIDN’T WANT THIS COME HELL OR HIGH WATER”: INSIDE MELANIA TRUMP’S SECRETIVE EAST WING

Understanding the most enigmatic First Lady—and unusual marriage—in modern political history.

By Sarah Ellinson

Holiday 2017

I. “NOT MY THING”

Back in 2014, when Donald Trump was considering yet again a run for president, he polled his friends and advisers about what he should do. He went through a lengthy process, toyed with running for governor of New York, and went back and forth on making any decision. Trump’s dalliance with politics dated back to 1987, when he was promoting The Art of the Deal. He generated publicity for the book (and himself) by buying space for “open letters” in major newspapers, criticizing American foreign policy. He then helicoptered to New Hampshire (which hosts the first presidential primaries) to give a well-attended speech at a local Rotary Club. Trump had seriously entertained a run in 2012, against Mitt Romney, whom he eventually endorsed, but then drew back. Roger Stone, a veteran Republican troublemaker and an early Trump adviser, told me recently that Trump had had “immediate seller’s remorse that he decided not to run” that year. In 2014, Trump was even more serious, and in the end he consulted one of his most discreet advisers—his wife, Melania. “She was very clearly the one who said, ‘Either run or don’t run,’ ” Stone explained. He went on, paraphrasing Melania: “ ‘Your friends are tired of this striptease. Every four years you talk about it.’ ”

Melania Trump / An Apology

Melania Trump

Melania Trump – An Apology

26 January 2019

Following last Saturday’s (Jan 19) Telegraph magazine cover story “The mystery of Melania”, we have been asked to make clear that the article contained a number of false statements which we accept should not have been published. Mrs Trump’s father was not a fearsome presence and did not control the family.  Mrs Trump did not leave her Design and Architecture course at University relating to the completion of an exam, as alleged in the article, but rather because she wanted to pursue a successful career as a professional model. Mrs Trump was not struggling in her modelling career before she met Mr Trump, and she did not advance in her career due to the assistance of Mr Trump.

We accept that Mrs Trump was a successful professional model in her own right before she met her husband and obtained her own modelling work without his assistance. Mrs Trump met Mr Trump in 1998, not in 1996 as stated in the article. The article also wrongly claimed that Mrs Trump’s mother, father and sister relocated to New York in 2005 to live in buildings owned by Mr Trump.  They did not. The claim that Mrs Trump cried on election night is also false.

Melania Trump

We apologise unreservedly to The First Lady and her family for any embarrassment caused by our publication of these allegations.  As a mark of our regret we have agreed to pay Mrs Trump substantial damages as well as her legal costs.

Melania on her way to Houston. Photo: Getty Images.

Melania Trump and the Chilling Artifice of Fashion

By Rhonda Garelick

August 30, 2017

Yesterday, heated debate over Melania Trump’s travel attire nearly overshadowed the very purpose of her trip: to bear witness to the devastation of the Houston hurricane. At stake was whether Melania’s look — slim black pants, face-framing blowout, green silk bomber, mirrored aviators, and sky-high snakeskin stilettos — was appropriately sober and practical for communing with victims of biblical-level flooding.

Photo: DON EMMERT/AFP/Getty Images

The Strange Experience of Watching Melania Trump Speak

By Rhonda GarelickSeptember 22, 2017

On Wednesday, Melania Trump gave a speech before a luncheon gathering of United Nations spouses, addressing cyberbullying and child advocacy. As usual, her look, affect, and performance conveyed infinitely more than her brief scripted speech ever could. Melania, in fact, is beginning to seem like an increasingly powerful — albeit unacknowledged — expression of all the madness swirling around the current administration.

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami review / A rambling voyage of discovery

Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami review – a rambling voyage of discovery

Xan Brooks

Wed 17 October 2018

A

nyone who has ever stared for hours at a blank laptop screen or surfed a deadline on to the rocks would be forgiven for feeling aggrieved by the serene, steady progress of Haruki Murakami. When at work on a novel, the Japanese author adheres to a strict daily routine. He rises at dawn, writes through the morning and then takes a 10km run in the afternoon. Eventually, he says, the writing and the running become indivisible, a “form of mesmerism” that serves to cast the author as a semiconscious agent in the forward movement of the narrative, or an observant traveller through pre-existing terrain. As an added bonus, this helps to fireproof the work against criticism, implying that any perceived failings – any missteps, soft patches or unexpected detours – are simply part of a book’s natural pattern. Murakami does not know entirely where he’s going and believes that’s as it should be. When you take the scenic route, you must expect some twists and turns.

Killing Commendatore, appropriately enough, charts the course of a man on the run who finally circles back towards home, dropping and retrieving narrative threads on the way (the book’s end point is revealed in the opening few pages). Its unnamed narrator is a 36-year-old portrait painter escaping the wreck of his marriage, in flight from his own emotions and contemplating a lonesome samurai-style existence in the mountains outside Odawara in central Japan. But the world, and the spirit world, keep rattling at his door. There is a mysterious bell that rings in the woods every night and a mysterious painting (Killing Commendatore, inspired by Mozart’s Don Giovanni) kept under wraps in the attic. Before long our hero’s remote retreat has become as busy as Grand Central Station, or a metaphysical Cluedo mansion in which each arrival comes armed with an opaque but important new piece of information. In a more conventional plot these pieces would eventually resolve themselves into a definitive photorealist picture; the kind Murakami’s narrator prides himself on producing. Here they are more likely to be dripped on to the canvas in the manner of an airy, swirling abstract painting.

Paul Klee once described the act of drawing as “taking a line for a walk”. No doubt Murakami views his writing in much the same fashion, as a creative ramble, as illuminating for himself as it is for his reader. His line zigzags, takes tangents and doubles back on itself. The view changes so often it’s hard not to feel turned around. Sometimes, reassuringly, Killing Commendatoreruns across ground the author has mapped out before. Its gallery of spirits, for instance, can be compared to the “Little People” he deployed in IQ84, while a mystical descent into a dry stone pit is a familiar Murakami trope, most conspicuously showcased in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

At other times the book trespasses freely on to neighbouring property. Its principal subplot about a charismatic millionaire who buys a mansion across the valley from the girl he believes to be his daughter provides a neat, knowing twist on The Great Gatsby (right down to the stilted first encounter at the narrator’s home). But the book’s more pulpy elements made me think of Stephen King’s 2008 bestseller Duma Key, another tale in which an artist flees his former life only to discover that paintings are magic portals and that the ghosts of the past refuse to lie quiet. Murakami, thank heaven, makes no great distinction between the high road of literary fiction and the low road of pop culture. He knows both are worth exploring and that each has its pleasures.

The issue, then, is one of navigation: those frequent changes in the tale’s direction of travel. Inside his rented home, the reclusive narrator is visited by Menshiki, the enigmatic tycoon from the big white house across the way, and by the living ghost of the house’s former occupant, who once tangled with the Nazis in 1930s Vienna. But his solitude is also gatecrashed by the Commendatore himself, a two-foot tall gremlin with a face like Edward G Robinson’s, who hops out of the painting claiming to be “an Idea” and darkly warning against double metaphors. Absurdity piles on absurdity. The tale grows more antic as the chapters mount up.

As ever, Murakami is brilliant at folding the humdrum alongside the supernatural; finding the magic that’s nested in life’s quotidian details. Yet on this occasion he allows his disparate elements to spin out too widely, to the point where they begin to appear only tenuously connected.

 

Murakami’s 14th novel feels almost like a debut – it is loquacious and digressive, making itself up as it goes along

Who are the spirits? Who are the real people? The hero’s married lover amounts to little more than a dispenser of expository dialogue and sexual favours (indirectly responsible for the book being classed as “class two indecent” in Hong Kong). Worse, the gnomic, fantastical Commendatore turns out to be a more rounded character than Menshiki’s reputed daughter, a preternaturally self-possessed 13-year-old who speaks as though she’s been fed through Google Translate. Significantly, Murakami’s painter likes to leave some of his portraits unfinished. One has the sense that the author does, too.Paradoxically, it’s this incompleteness that this beguiling, confounding – and yes, sometimes infuriating – novel is concerned with: the sense that everybody is unfinished, a work in progress, and that any clear-cut resolution is therefore a lie. Murakami’s mountainside setting is full of wormholes and blind spots, arrivals and exits. His plot, such as it is, unfolds as the narrator experiences it, which means that it’s thick with loose ends and cul‑de-sacs. His character is casting about for the correct way forward. He’s attempting to script a fresh adventure that will give his battered life meaning and distract him from his divorce, so his story sets forth as a tale of creative rebirth. Then it switches lanes to become a study of male friendship; then a haunted house story; then a father-daughter mystery yarn. Each route is valid but it can only take him so far. “In this real world of ours,” he explains, “nothing remains the same for ever.”

Murakami, as is his habit, shares a number of interests with his unnamed narrator (the films of Akira Kurosawa, the albums of Bruce Springsteen). Let’s assume he shares some of his uncertainty, too. As such, Killing Commendatore, his 14th novel, feels almost like a debut. It’s a voyage of discovery, loquacious and digressive, largely making itself up as it goes along. The deeper into the woods it progresses, the more abundantly woolly the scenery grows. I suspect a real first-time novelist would probably start to panic at this point, desperately attempting to impose some order on events. But Murakami is happy to exist in a state of flux, entirely unperturbed by the circuitous course he has taken. His pace remains easy and unhurried. 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.

• Xan Brooks’s The Clocks in This House All Tell Different Times is published by Salt. Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, £20).

THE GUARDIAN

Dear Mariella / Out-of-date casanovas

Casanova by Louis Icart, 1928

DEAR MARIELLA

LIFE AND STYLE

Out-of-date casanovas

Her long-distance lover is a duplicitous serial seducer... Why does she still want him?

Mariella Frostrup
Sunday 5 October 2003

Recently, towards the end of yet another lovely date with a man I've known for 18 months, he began commenting on the bodies of women around us, and their likely sexual performance. This was out of character (having previously told me I was the only woman he'd slept with in the time I'd known him) and so was his telling me about the sex he'd had with six women that he had dated in the six weeks since we'd last seen each other.

Back at his flat he gave me the doorstep chat-up lines he'd used and told me how once they were on the stairs to his flat he would 'know he had them'. An argument ensued in which he became abusive, and having travelled from my home city to see him, I left at 3am to find a hotel. As a result he says we need some space. I don't want to expose myself to similar humiliating behaviour but I'm feeling deeply sad, as we otherwise have a really great time together. It is years since I have felt as strongly for a man with whom there was some reciprocity. Did I behave as unreasonably as he seems to think?

What a jerk. This idiot you've been dating thinks he's clever because he can get laid. It's a boast that's barely worth the breath used to utter it. Nowadays sex is as easy to find as the name Smith in the phone book. The sexy thing to do is to be seen to avoid it. What you should be wondering is why it's taken you 18 months to see through his smarmy exterior to the serial seducer within. And if the word 'seducer' carries any poetic resonance for you then it's time to work out why. In your necessarily abridged letter you say you two don't yet have 'a committed relationship'. Why on earth would you want one with this out-of-date Casanova? He's as unfashionable as those Juicy tracksuits everyone was wearing last year.

There was a time when the world admired a 'bounder'. In Victorian days, when the flicker of an eyelash was considered coming on too strong, the notion that there were people out there breaking down sexual taboos was quite impressive. In an era famous for its explorers, these men were pioneers in their chosen field, taking brave steps for mankind into unmapped erogenous zones in pursuit of emancipation for both sexes. In retrospect they could be viewed as pioneers in a sexual desert, fighting for our right to claim our bodies and what we did with them as a basic human right.

'Bachelor' was a label to be admired, signifying a man who wasn't prepared to compromise his principles for the sake of social mores. Plenty of women would doubtless have liked to join those ranks and indeed a brave minority did, but theirs was much more challenging terrain. To this day there's a stigma involved in being a single or sexually active woman that men are only just beginning to experience.

In the 21st century, one of the greatest day-to-day challenges of those of us in the 'free' West is escaping sex. Whether it's in movies, via the internet, in a magazine, or in your own bed, the sheer abundance of it is enough to turn us all into sexual bulimics. I'm not suggesting we all take a vow of celibacy, but honestly, where's the challenge in getting your leg over? Finding love hasn't become any easier, but if you're prepared to compromise, pay or just put out, any idiot can pick up a lover. For those reasons alone this man of yours looks tawdry. He's not mature enough to have a serious relationship so he tries to disguise his inadequacy with an abundance of 'conquests'.

He obviously zooms in on long-distance lovers as the perfect route to keeping things casual and when he feels he's getting out of his depth exposes himself for the duplicitous weakling he is. This is a double-pronged attack that avoids any real action from him and also winds up the affair, or worse, extends it on his terms. In an expert move, he's left you feeling a little guilty for being unreasonable but unenthusiastic about a return to the status quo.

Now he's hoping your lack of self-esteem will deliver you back to him, bullied out of having reasonable expectations and hating yourself for being weak enough to accept it. If you go back he'll have you exactly where he wants you, at arm's length, to toy with as he pleases. Don't give him that opportunity.

Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew might offer you an insight into his tactics. You talk about reciprocity, but if this sort of behaviour is your idea of sharing then I suggest you get a little more demanding. There's no downside; if you regret dispensing with him you'll find another volunteer just around the corner. Believe me, guys like him actually do grow on trees. Then again, maybe he was just trying to impress you.

THE GUARDIAN