Killing Commendatore – Haruki Murakami

Rating: 4.5 stars

I think Murakami is my favorite modern author. No one else has gotten me to read multiple books that they’ve written (okay, not counting genre fiction stuff like Game of Thrones, Harry Potter and Malazaan, which doesn’t really count in my opinion, so I’m not a liar, stop saying I am).

The story is about an artist in the classical sense and not the ‘what is art?’ sense. I feel like, if I weren’t an author myself, I would’ve had a vastly different opinion because the whole book feels like an allegory for the writing process–what follows next is SPOILERS, skip to the next paragraph if you care about that sort of thing—especially chapter 56 or 57 that’s about the narrator’s journey through the metaphorical world.

That reminds me of something, that every Murakami book I’ve read so far always has left me with this sense of “that’s it?” It’s felt like every time there’s this big bad thing the protagonist is supposed to be afraid of, and it ends up not being that bad. The little people of 1Q84 felt like this, and the danger of this book felt the same. I am not saying that’s a bad thing. In fact, I think it’s a very good thing and something that I less-than-consciously emulate. The truth of the world is what Murakami lays out. There is a bad person, usually, but there is also a little bad in everyone, including the protagonist. The evil in the world must be confronted but so must it be everywhere (to varying degrees, of course).

One thing that I liked about this story is that the protagonist is very introspective and talks about his emotions. As I said in my other review, sometimes you get this feeling like in the Bible or other ancient literature, that people do whatever they do, and outside of being in that culture you don’t really get it. I didn’t get that feeling in Killing Commendatore, and while the reader could be overburdened by purple prose or whatever, it adds more because that’s what I feel like this book is, personal.

I read a review that criticized some of the characters for being flat and others being more dynamic than they deserved to be. I don’t quite agree with that. Yeah, not many of the characters were fully fleshed out, but I got the feeling that they were supposed to be kinda like a painting. The art itself is flat, but you can see a bit of depth. In other words, it felt appropriate. My biggest complaint is how the chapters are titled. The titles serve no purpose other than to be a quirky hunt to identify what part of the chapter they came from.