Jargogled Impressions.

A portrait artist is devastated after his wife leaves him suddenly. He leaves for a long road trip to ruminate on life and in the process ends up in a one-night stand with a strange lady who may be fleeing from a man in a White Subaru. The artist feels guilty and fears that the man in the Subaru is judging him on his deed. What brings an end to his road trip across Japan is his car breaks down. His friend offers him a temporary residence at his ancestral property, itself an abode of a prominent Japanese painter.

While starting his new life, the painter comes across strange phenomena in the house – a hidden painting in the attic with an owl to guard it, a ring suddenly and mysteriously coming alive in the middle of the night, and a strange businessman who takes a liking to our painter. Add to that a treasure trove of classical western music and scotch, and you have the sine qua non of a Murakami novel.

The eeriness pervades everything around the painter. The ring seems to be coming from an underground hideout for ancient mystic monks, the businessman it seems has a secret he is wont to not give away to anyone, and the painter seems to be inflicted with the hidden painting in the attic and takes an instant liking to it. His hallucinations, which maybe real, comes alive in the middle of the novel and makes for competing interpretations – the hall-mark of a Murakami novel.

I find myself drawn to Murakami often. There’s something about the languid pace of his books, coupled with a seemingly likeable albeit deadbeat protagonist who appears to bring out the secrets from everybody around him. His retreat from a normal life always coming straight out of the bottle in the initial few pages of the novel and the strangeness that engulfs him and takes him by surprise almost always is infused with a dedication towards music, a healthy regard for cooking, and a temperament for alcohol. There’s this mismatch between the expectations from the novel that is always met, and the strange happenings to the protagonist that is amusing and calming at the same time.

Reading “Killing Commendatore”, a long-read at that, was fun and engrossing experience with most of it a page turner, as I often find Murakami novels to be. His books make me long to go to Japan and experience it all for myself and, prejudicial as it may sound, I try to search for these protagonists with weirdly unnatural lives in the Japanese folks I see around me. There is an element of active imagination and interpretation that his novels evoke that make reading them more than just a passive exercise. You can call it my guilty pleasure – the constant coming back to a Murakami novel.

There is also an element of discovery in the pages as we navigate his books. The protagonist, in this case, seeks to uncover strange happenings around him by deciding to follow through on his curiosities and saying “yes” to strange requests. It’s this openness to experience that I find absorbing in the pages. Borrowing from the Great Gatsby or the potboilers from the stables of Stephen King, Killing Commendatore is an active exploration of the spirits world, of the analogous world of ideas, of the strangeness of living, and of the free association of ideas and of experiences.

It’s worth a read if you want to escape from the current grim environment and indulge yourself in the journey of discovery that the protagonist takes as he navigates a setback in his life and tries to orient himself in the new world he finds himself in as a result.