So you might have finished Killing Commendatore
and be asking yourself: What the f@*k just
happened.
Let me try to explain.
So I was so excited to read this brand new
book from Haruki Murakami, and then I found
out it was released about a year and a half
ago.
I mean, where the hell have I been?
As with my last video, I’ll be pinning the
best comment in the first twenty four hours,
so get in a comment, and stay tuned to the
end of the video where we’ll play Murakami Bingo.
But so what is this book about?
Killing Commendatore is the story of an unnamed
painter who separates from his distant wife
and moves to the mountains near Odawara.
There he stays in a mountainside mansion that
once belonged to a very talented painter named
Tomohiko Amada.
He discovers some of the man’s work in the
attic: a painting called Killing Commendatore,
which shows the gruesome scene of a man being
stabbed in battle.
What happens next opens a world of metaphors
and miniature men.
It should be noted that since this is going
to be a deep dive, there will be spoilers
beyond this point.
In the middle of the night, the unnamed artist
discovers that the mountains are eerily silent,
except for a faint bell ringing, that leads
him to a cavernous space in the ground.
After he meets a man named Menshiki, he and
the protagonist dig up the area and find a
bell.
When he brings it back, the protagonist is
confronted with the living embodiment of Commandatore:
the man being stabbed in Tomohiko Amada’s
painting.
One of the major themes in the book is the
idea of creativity.
The main character begins the story as a portrait
painter.
He paints commissions and creates these images
under the guidance of the client.
It is very transactional.
Throughout the course of the book, Menshiki
asks him to paint his portrait, but doesn’t
give him any parameters.
The protagonist is actually left confronted
by this creative freedom.
So now that you know the setup, we can take
a step back, because this is where things
get a little complicated as we head back to
the beginning of the book (which is sort of
the end).
Bear with me.
“Where would you like to start?”
“Probably the pro-lo-gue.”
In the prologue, the protagonist is visited
by a faceless man, who asks him to paint his
portrait, but the man is unable to paint to
shapeless vortex of moving clouds that make
up the man’s face.
Reading this without any context of the greater
story can be very confusing, particularly
if you aren’t aware of Murakami’s storytelling,
but this is actually taking place after the
events of the story, and the faceless man
is revisiting him after he returned to his
wife and fathered his child (but more on that
weird situation later).
This faceless man, who bares a striking resemblance
to the man in René Magritte’s 1964 painting,
The Son of Man, could be seen as a physical
manifestation of creativity, and the ebbs
and flows that come with creative expression.
This man seems to flit in and out of the protagonists
life like a muse.
The faceless man could also be interpreted
as the protagonist himself, and the mask that
he hides behind after returning to his wife
and leaving behind the creativity that he
explores throughout the novel.
This would feed back into the similarities
to The Son of Man.
When asked about the painting, Margritte said:
“At least it hides the face partly well,
so you have the apparent face, the apple,
hiding the visible but hidden, the face of
the person…
A sort of conflict, one might say, between
the visible that is hidden and the visible
that is present.”
This could be the visible doting father that
the protagonist turns into in the prologue,
who loves his daughter, or the artist who
is still trying to produce the work that lives
in his creative spirit.
I bet your starting to suspect that I am a
stuck up hipster at this point, so before
we get too deep in this quagmire of pretentious
interpretation, let’s move on to the characters.
Commendatore
Commendatore is the man from the painting.
Literally to scale with the painting.
This tiny man tells the protagonist that he
is an idea that has taken the familiar form
of the painting to make things easier for
him.
He discusses the ideas of ideas, and serves
as a guide to the protagonist as he works
his way through the events in his life.
Commendatore is neither kind nor callous.
He doesn’t perceive time the same way as
us.
He works on a completely independent plane
of existence to us, which provides a lot of
conflict between the two characters in their
roles as protagonist and mentor.
The Man in the White Subaru Forester
While travelling to Odawara, the protagonist
stops in the Miyagi prefecture, where he meets
a woman.
They have sex, and she wants it be violent.
The protagonist is hesitant to do this.
He also considers that she is running away
from a man in a white Subaru Forester, which
the protagonist quite creatively names: The
Man in the White Subaru Forester.
The man has a haunting, almost demonic, presence
in the book.
The protagonist tries to paint him out of
his mind, but he can’t get the face right.
As events progress throughout the story, he
sees the Man in the White Subaru Forester,
and when Mariye Akigawa, one of the protagonist’s
art students, sees the half-finished painting,
she warns him to stay away from the painting
because she senses an evil presence.
Menshiki
Menshiki is the mysterious silver haired neighbour
that lives opposite the protagonist.
His name translates to colourless.
In an interview with Kyodo News, Murakami
was asked about the connection between Menshiki
and the character of Tsukuru Tazaki from his
novel Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Prilgimage.
Murakami admitted that this connection had
been lost on him, and the character of Menshiki
was an homage to The Great Gatsby, but also
served as a contrast to that character.
“Gatsby worked his way up from poverty to
a life of glitz that attracts attention because that's his goal.
In contrast, Mr. Menshiki lives an ordinary,
calm life.
Their personalities and characters differ.
I only borrowed a setting from Gatsby."
Menshiki also shares similar opposites with the protagonist.
The protagonist moved to the mountains to
get away from his broken family, while Menshiki
moved to the mountains to be closer to Mariye
Akigawa, who he believes to be his daughter.
Menshiki doesn’t want to be in Mariye’s
life; just being close to her is enough.
When confronted about DNA testing, Menshiki
explains that if he were to find out she was
his daughter, it could destroy the girl’s
life; he discovered she wasn’t, that would
be bad for him.
Neither is preferable, and so Menshiki says
he is happy with the possibility.
So, it’s kinda like Japanese Mamma Mia,
if it also included spirits, blood, and sex.
This mirrors the protagonists life towards
the end of the story.
During the novel, he dreams of raping his
wife as she is sleeping, but he is convinced
that it is real (even though there is no way
it could be).
His wife has been seeing a man, and the protagonist
finds out she is pregnant.
The protagonist believes that this encounter
transcended the physical realm and actually
got her pregnant, which is almost like macho
arrogance.
“Love, I can get you pregnant just by dreaming
about it.”
But while Menshiki is happy to oversee from
a distance, the protagonist returns to his
wife and treats the child as his daughter.
He is certain she is his.
Mariye Akigawa
Not only does Mariye serve as the potential
daughter to Menshiki, she also serves as a
surrogate sister.
The protagonists’ sister suffered from a
congenital heart defect, and she died at the
age of twelve.
As a young man, the protagonist would stare
at his sister’s chest and imagine the broken
heart rattling around in her ribcage.
Then, as his sister began to develop, this
was seen as something negative, and this follows
into his personal relationships.
He prefers flat-chested women.
Many people have mentioned the bizarre sexual
connotations in the relationship between Mariye
and the protagonist.
It is definitely weird, and at times uncomfortable,
to hear him have these frank discussions with
his surrogate sister, but at no point are
they sexual.
As the story progresses, and Mariye goes missing,
her penguin charm ends up in the unearthed
shrine.
These charms are very common in Japan and
are tied to cell phones with an endless variety
of animals and characters.
From this point, the charm becomes a token
or offering.
The protagonist then uses the charm in the
climax as an offering to get through the final
trial.
It also appears in the prologue after the
story is complete.
The faceless man offers him the plastic penguin
in exchange for a portrait.
Tomohiko Amada
Masahiko Amada, one of the protagonist’s
art school friends, offers to put him up in
his father’s house, since his father was
in an assisted living facility.
His father, Tomohiko Amada, was a famous painter
who studied in Europe, then suddenly changed
to a Japanese style of painting.
He even visited the house again in a spiritual
form (which reinforces the protagonists notion
that things are possible beyond what we know,
which is why he believed that he could impregnate
his wife from across the country).
But Tomohiko Amada represents the distant
relationship between father and son.
In this New Yorker article, Abandoning a Cat:
Memories of my father, Murakami stated the
relationship with his father, and the rift
that formed between them.
This was obviously tied to the suspicion that
his father was involved in the Nanjing massacre.
As stated before, he wasn’t involved, but
he recalls in the article that his father
only once told him about this experience in
the second sino-Japanese war.
He told his son in graphic detail a brutal
decapitation, which seared into a young Haruki
Murakami’s mind.
This plays into the novel in a subplot with
Masahiko Amada discussing his relationship
with his father.
He discusses that his family has a dark shameful
secret.
A family member was involved in the war, and
had to decapitate an enemy soldier.
He was seen as weak for not simply committing
the act, and suffering from PTSD, he recorded
the instances, which only a few family members
read.
It was promptly burned to avoid any shame
on the family.
This damage and PTSD comes directly from the
experiences that his father had a war, and
the deep scars even just a fraction of the
story that was told to Murakami as a child
had left on him.
Murakami extracts things like this from real
life, and that’s why so much of it feels
real because it is rooted in real emotions.
It feels genuine.
During the climax, the protagonist must kill
Commendatore and open a portal into the subconscious
world of the painting.
There he must travel through the world of
metaphors and double metaphors like the Man
in the White Subaru Forester.
This journey that he goes on through these
metaphors is a rebirth, since he was lost
in the darkness for three days then came out
of the shrine in the ground near his house
with Mariye found safe and sound (She had
been hiding in Menshiki’s house).
After this, he comes out a new person and
returns to a normal, creatively unfulfilling
life with his wife and child, but as we’ve
already discussed, the pull of creativity
never truly leaves him.
The faceless man will continue to visit him
and offer him that charm in exchange for his
portrait.
Now for the moment you’ve all been waiting
for: Murakami Bingo!
So here we have the Murakami Bingo here.
So we do have a mysterious woman.
We don’t really have an ear fetish, but,
uh, we do have a well, or at least a well
of sorts.
Something does vanish throughout the story,
and I do think there is a feeling of being
followed at one point or another.
Uh, we have an unexpected phone call, but
to be fair a lot of these things are probably
similar to a lot of Murakami work.
We do have music.
He doesn’t really listen to jazz music perse;
more so classical music.
There are absolutely supernatural themes within
this book that you’ll probably find in most
Haruki Murakami work.
There is running, but I wouldn’t say it’s
a huge part.
We do have secret passageways.
There are a lot of these dark corridors in
this book.
Not necessarily a flashback, history does
play a factor.
There is definitely a precocious teenager.
Cooking does play a small role in the, not
obviously a huge one.
Uh, as with most Haruki Murakami’s, there
is definitely a parallel world.
Weird sex, I mean, that’s gonna get coloured
in every time.
Goes without saying.
There are a couple of unusual names, and we
will get to that.
And this is probably the biggest one for a
faceless villain.
So that’s about it.
So I think we’ve ended up with a fairly
decent array here, though, but I will say
that I don’t think we’ve made any kind
of Bingo in this book.
So even though I thought this was the biggest
collection of his tropes that I’ve seen
so far, I’m surprised to see I didn’t
even get a Bingo on this.
