Review by Gabrielle Blondell
It can be weird, eerie even, after a relationship breaks down. Try as we might to stay singular in a partnership, there is a blurring of lines. We borrow from each other – ideas, beliefs, underpants. It’s easier that way, economic. So when the relationship dissolves, it’s a wrench. We are left with pieces missing. It’s not just who we are now that is the challenge. It’s how we have changed since the last time we were single. A metamorphosis has occurred and moving on seems so difficult with our newly partial selves.
Haruki Murakami’s novel, Killing Commendatore, reminds me of such things. The story is set just as our narrator is separating from his wife. Her wish to leave comes as a shock and it is through this filter that he tells his extraordinary tale. There is no doubt this is magical realism, which is a genre I don’t normally go for, but I’ve been divorced and I know the landscape is foggy and unfamiliar. I know what it wrings out of us, the passions, the thoughts, the dreams and the fears and so in the case of Killing Commendatore, I could go the whole distance.
Murakami’s style is conversational, as if the narrator is telling the story over a whiskey in a bar. He informs us from the outset that he reconciles with his wife at the end, but that the period when they were apart stood there ‘mouth agape’.
That the unnamed narrator has been a successful portrait painter, who is now questioning his own identity, is a writerly masterstroke, I think.
“As I stared at myself in the mirror, I thought about what it would be like to paint my own portrait. Say I were to try, what sort of self would I end up painting? … Would I be able to discover even one thing shining within me?”
The narrator is offered the loan of a house in the mountains in central Japan by his friend from art school. It belongs to his friend’s father, a famous artist, who is now suffering from dementia in a nursing home. It is in this setting that Murakami starts to weave a wild and wonderful tale.
Across the valley, lies a large modern home owned by the extremely wealthy and mysterious Menshiki who spies on the narrator’s neighbours and is reminiscent of Jay Gatsby. However, things get much weirder when the narrator discovers an unknown masterpiece, entitled ‘Killing Commendatore’, very obviously painted by his friend’s famous father. With the unearthing of the painting, comes a series of unusual events. A bell begins to ring in the woods and a stone chamber is uncovered and an ‘idea’ is brought to life. It takes the form of a two foot tall spirit in the likeness of the Commendatore depicted in the masterpiece. I did try to warn you. It does get strange, but keep on with it. It is a great testament to this writer, that you will be carried along.
Murakami gives us plenty of the things to be preoccupied with, perhaps my favourite being his depictions of the creative process, as our narrator attempts throw over his previous portrait style and paint for himself.
“I still wasn’t sure exactly what form the painting would take. But I did know how I should begin. Those first steps – which brush to use, what colors, the direction of the first stroke – had come to me out of nowhere: they had gained a foothold in my mind and, bit by bit, taken on a tangible reality of their own.”
I imagine Murakami is speaking of his writing here too, that the process is mysterious and not completely in control of the writer. It is nice to think help comes from elsewhere or from deep within. Of the paintings in his novel, there is a magical quality and a kind of alchemy in the making of them.
“A spectator to the process – if one is present – can’t tell the difference between a painting in process and a completed painting, for the line is virtually invisible to the naked eye. But the artist know. He or she can hear the painting say, Hands off, I’m done. The artist has only to heed that voice.”
There is alchemy in this novel too. It is both a physical and emotional adventure. It teases out our edges. It’s such a foggy plain (the inside of our heads) and perhaps the breakdown of a marriage can serve as a catalyst in bringing who we are and are not before our own eyes. We push to break free and sometimes discover we wish we could go back.