November 2018
Noted
‘Killing Commendatore’ by Haruki Murakami
The 700 pages of Killing Commendatore (Harvill Secker; $45) ripple into being like an unfolding Japanese screen, each panel another miniature stage set. Murakami’s universe is embedded with obsessions, patterned with music and art, and it slants in every surprising and exhilarating way.
The Commendatore of the title is a character in Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni. Murdered by Don Juan in Act 1, Scene 1, he reappears in different form late in the opera. Don Giovanni, skittering about between comedy, tragedy and the supernatural, is annoying to follow but not necessary to know when reading Murakami’s new novel. As always, music inflects every particle of his universe. The central character and narrator, significantly unnamed, talks and plays Richard Strauss but is equally fond of jazz and contemporary American song. A portrait painter, he tells his story with a bizarre tranquillity, brushing in drama with firm black strokes, and foregrounding details in vibrant colour. He inserts tiny lectures on traditional Japanese painting.
The narrator is successful in his art and happily married until, at 36, his wife of six years tells him she can no longer live with him. She confesses that she has a lover but her need to end their marriage is for a reason she refuses to explain. In shock, he leaves their house that evening. After some weeks of aimless driving and sleeping in cheap places, he takes up a suggestion that he caretake the mountaintop house of a friend’s father, a revered traditional artist who is now in aged care. The narrator finds a violent Western-style painting, unlike anything the famous old artist has ever done, hidden in the roof of the house. Written across the packing is the title, Killing Commendatore.
The mountain is another world. In the house’s garden there is a shrine with a cellar once used to wall in volunteer monks determined to starve themselves into the next plane of being. Across the valley, directly opposite the narrator’s modest house, there is a magnificent, showy contemporary house. When the owner of this house, Mr Menshiki, arrives in his exquisite car and even more exquisite clothes, the narrator is intrigued. But Menshiki’s external perfection deflects any attempt at intimacy. He is a portrait without a face.
Menshiki, whose name means “avoiding colours”, drives the central plot. He could be the most dangerous charmer the narrator will ever meet. Or the most enabling.
I, too, disliked fantastical characters elbowing themselves into adult novels until I read David Mitchell’s The Bone Clocks. Mitchell redefines time, and Murakami’s novel is reminiscent of Mitchell’s in the best sense. Inspiration, not imitation. Murakami facilitates adults to read again as if they were children. An enchantment to the soul and a lure to the mind.
There is nowhere quite like The Monthly. We are told that we live in a time of diminished attention spans; a time where the 24-hour-news-cycle has produced a collective desire for hot takes and brief summaries of the news and ideas that effect us. But we don’t believe it. The need for considered, reflective, long-form journalism has never been greater, and for almost 20 years, that’s what The Monthly has offered, from some of our finest writers.
That kind of quality writing costs money, and requires the support of our readers. Your subscription to The Monthly allows us to be the home for the best, most considered, most substantial perspectives on the state of the world. It’s Australia’s only current affairs magazine, an indispensable home for cultural commentary, criticism and reviews, and home to personal and reflective essays that celebrate and elevate our humanity.
The Monthly doesn’t just comment on our culture, our society and our politics: it shapes it. And your subscription makes you part of that.
Select your digital subscription
