"WE'D LIVED under the same roof for six years, yeti knew next to nothing about this woman," explains the narrator of "Killing Commendatore," Haruki Murakami's overlong and somewhat undercooked tale of supernatural happenings in rural Japan. He's talking about his wife, whose decision to divorce him has precipitated his flight from Tokyo to the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, where he is staying in a house that once belonged to a famous painter. Over the course of Murakami's 17 previous books of fiction, readers have become familiar with "Murakami man," a listless, socially isolated guy whose interests tend to circle around music, books, home cooking and cats, and whose lack of anchor in the everyday world often precipitates a sort of slippage into a netherworld of ghosts and spirits. In "Killing Commendatore," this man is a portrait painter who makes a living from commissions but has no deep connection to the work he makes. By contrast, Tomohiko Amada, the painter whose house he's renting, was a major artist, who turned from Western-style "cutting-edge modern oil paintings" to Japanese-style work after getting involved in an abortive political assassination as a student in 1930 s Vienna. He is now in a nursing home, suffering from dementia. After a period of "producing nothingness," listening to Amada's collection of classical LPs and conducting an emotionally uninvolving affair with a local married woman, the narrator finds one of Amada's paintings rolled up in the attic. It turns out to be a representation of a scene in Mozart's "Don Giovanni," with the characters dressed in the style of seventh-century Japanese courtiers. In the opera, Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, who is the father of a woman he has attempted to seduce, after the old man tries to block his escape from the family house. This depiction of the murder, the narrator says, has "something that shook the viewer to the core." "There is," he adds bathetically, "something very special about this painting." Amada's decision to represent a scene from a pillar of the Western canon in a classical Japanese style seems not unconnected with Murakami's own commitments as a reader and translator of Carver, Fitzgerald and other American writers. Murakami's low-key cool owes much to his love of American jazz, and his playfulness and absurdism often bring to mind Vonnegut and Brautigan, who were popular among his generation of countercultural Japanese. Japanese audiences have bought millions of his books, despite critics grumbling about his Western touchstones, an attitude exemplified by Kenzaburo Oe's sniffy remark that Murakami's writing "isn't really Japanese.... It could be read very naturally in New York." This is true only up to a point. The 18th-century ghost stories of Ueda Akinari (most familiar outside Japan through Mizoguchi's 1953 film "Ugetsu") and the demonological compendiums of Toriyama Sekien hover in the background of "Killing Commendatore," as they do in so much contemporary Japanese horror and fantasy, notably the anime of Hayao Miyazaki ("Spirited Away," "My Neighbor Totoro"). Though "Killing Commendatore" does not address authenticity in specifically national-cultural terms, the novel is preoccupied with the possibility of making art infused with depth or spirit. The mechanical painter of commissioned portraits comes under the influence of the man whose house he's living in, and is moved to make works with real expressive power. "What I'd created was, at heart, a painting I'd done for my own sake." The novel offers some promising mysteries. The catalyst for the narrator's artistic renaissance is a reclusive businessman who is hiding out in the mountains to be near a 13-year-old girl he believes to be his daughter. A persistent ringing sound is coming from beneath a cairn of stones in the woods behind the house, and may be connected to an ancient Buddhist practice in which meditating monks had themselves entombed alive. The narrator and his neighbor remove the stones and open up a pit, which becomes a familiar Murakamiesque location, a liminal space between worlds. Amada's painting and Mozart's opera become part of a tangled net of references and symbols. As historical secrets and hauntings begin to pile on top of one another, one has the sense of a writer throwing a lot of ideas against a wall in the hope that something will stick. The plot is full of melodramatic bustle, but its wheels spin without gaining much traction. This is partly a result of Murakami's customary detachment. Faced with the supernatural, Murakami man experiences no Lovecraftian challenge to the foundations of his sanity, no creeping sense of dread. Instead he reacts with mild concern and head-scratching curiosity. When the Commendatore from Amada's painting comes to life and begins speaking to the narrator, he is at first "frozen" but is soon chatting away happily, before lapsing into tiredness and concluding that "it felt like it had taken place in a dream." A state of dreamlike indeterminacy is perhaps the most consistent atmosphere in Murakami's fiction. In his best work, such as "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," an examination of Japanese war crimes in Manchuria, the feeling of tumbling from bardo to bardo masks trauma and becomes a way to approach the willful forgetting of the postwar period. The low-key tone of Murakami's narrators, which in earlier books like "Norwegian Wood" scanned as hipster cool, has in recent years come to feel more like depersonalization and isolation, a malaise not unlike that associated with hikikomori, the young shut-ins who have become a symbol of contemporary spiritual crisis. In "Killing Commendatore," the narrator's dreaminess mainly feels unfocused, and a story that might have been engaging at 300 or 400 pages is drawn out to almost 700. This is a novel in which no character can go to meet a friend at a restaurant without a description of the route and the traffic conditions. In Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen's translation, Murakami's limitations as a prose writer are on uncomfortable display. The narrator enjoys listening to Mozart, Beethoven and other greats of the Germanic classical repertoire. "Their music was deep, amazing and gorgeous," he informs us, sounding like an online review. And what about the narrator's wife? In these 700 pages, we don't find out too much about her, or indeed about any of the women who float like shades through the novel. She is chiefly interesting to him because she reminds him of his younger sister, who died at the age of 12, when her breasts were just beginning to develop. He connects this loss to his "feeling akin to fear about women with larger than normal breasts." The neighbor's teenage daughter, the focus of much of the plot, is chiefly characterized by her preoccupation with her "budding breasts," whose size she frequently discusses. The doubling of the two pubescent girls, one dead, one alive, is apparently intended to be charming and poignant. "Killing Commendatore" is a baggy monster, a disappointment from a writer who has made much better work. As the narrator says, awkwardly, about one of his minor supernatural experiences: "That might have just been a piece of a fragmentary dream." A state of dreamlike indeterminacy is perhaps the most consistent atmosphere in Murakami's fiction. hari kunzru is the author, most recently, of the novel "White Tears." |