Murakami Haruki

Following his separation from his wife, a modest painter of commissioned portraits undertakes a journey across Japan. In a motel, he comes close to strangling a girl whose name he does not even know. > Just pretend, she had told me. But would I be able to get away with so little, was I sure?. (...) Because it obeyed an inner impulse of my own...(...) That was what truly frightened me, in the depths of my consciousness As in other novels by the author (see on this site the reviews of *Kafka on the Shore* and *Norwegian Wood*), an intricate journey into consciousness begins from a traumatic event on the brink of the abyss, during which the plot and characters dissolve into an oneiric and metaphysical world. This time, at the core of the reflection lies the function of art, conceived as an “implicit, secret, incomprehensible sign,” capable of allowing us to “slip through the narrow aperture that separates nothingness from reality.” Weary of wandering, the protagonist finds refuge in the mountain home belonging to the father of a friend—the great artist Amada Tomohiko. The residence is abandoned because the elderly painter has been admitted to a care facility for the aged. In the attic, the protagonist discovers a painting, *Killing Commendatore*, depicting a homicide inspired by a scene from Mozart’s *Don Giovanni*. Although Tomohiko had adopted the traditional Japanese style—seemingly ill-suited to expressing intense emotions—the painting depicts a bloody duel: a young man brutally slays an old man, the Commendatore, before the stunned gaze of a lady in an elegant white dress and a coarse, vulgar man, while the head of a mysterious witness emerges from a trapdoor. I have paused to describe this painting because it is from this very work that the novel’s various narrative threads branch out. It is as though we were faced with a succession of metaphors in which the signs of the painting, from the scene itself to the physical spaces, manifest within the plot and characters. As is typical of Haruki, many implausible, indecipherable, and heavily symbolic events occur: so many and of such nature that the reader, and alongside him the modest painter, finds himself trapped in a snare of metaphors. How can one return to reality and find oneself? The scene in the painting must come to life: before Tomohiko—demented yet alert—the protagonist slays the elderly Commendatore, escapes through the trapdoor, journeys through a narrow, pitch-black passage, is aided by the white lady from the painting (the Blue Fairy or Beatrice?), saves himself, and emerges from a mysterious hole near a small Buddhist temple. A Dantean journey? Perhaps, yet the conclusion is not Paradise; it is the prosaic life of a modest painter. Perhaps the protagonist has freed himself from his own guilt by bringing balance to his existence, even if life remains like “a tightrope walker's wire.” This extremely long and muddled novel seems like the testament of an author who was unable to restrain himself. One has to wonder whether Haruki had a clear sense from the beginning of where he wanted to go, or if instead the world of ideas took over, causing the characters to evolve without ever truly defining themselves—remaining suspended in limbo—while events piled up just as they occurred to the author's mind, without purpose or direction. Throughout the narrative, the style remains invariably precise and detailed, as though the author sought to chronicle something that has precious little reality to it: a nineteenth-century-style novel of an oneiric vision. This contradiction emerges clearly in the way the author describes the work of the protagonist painter: meticulous, attentive, almost photographic; yet all his works remain unfinished, and their very inconclusiveness constitutes their allure. The narrative is underscored by the sound of opera and classical music—a paradoxical choice, considering how orderly and rational such music is, and therefore hardly congenial to a confused mind like the author's. Why not read it? It is extremely long and boring.