Robin Young's Reviews > Killing Commendatore

Of the seven Murakami novels that I've read, most have been, at their heart, the same story: A man with no discernible personality, opinions, or connections to other people leads a solitary life in which he cooks, listens to records, drinks "glass after glass of water" and sometimes a can of beer, and receives the occasional mysterious phone call. He has surface-level physical relationships with women whose bodies he seems to see as having ulterior motives; he finds himself in odd situations with beautiful teenage girls who, when they speak, do so in a monotone. A woman goes missing, and he has to travel into alternate dimensions to find them. He looks at the moon, contemplates the concept of time, and questions the nature of reality. He fixates about breasts and what it would be like to sit in dark holes in the ground that he can't climb out of. He encounters mystical phenomena whose existence he's never fully able to explain, and that can only be understood through a literary lens.

For me, there exists a continuum between the Murakami novels that, to me, feel formulaic and shallow (Sputnik Sweetheart, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki—sorry, I know a lot of people loved that one!), and the ones that feel genuinely original and compelling (1Q84, Kafka on the Shore). Killing Commendatore is on the 1Q84 side of the continuum for me, and is the closest in spirit to that novel of the Murakami books I've read.

I found this story tedious at times because of its meticulous, often repetitive chronicling of the protagonist's observations of his day-to-day life—from the food he cooks and the music he listens to, to the clothes people wear and the cars they drive. However, there was a mysterious, mystical element undergirding the entire story that left me wanting to return to this story day after day even when I wasn't particularly enjoying the experience of reading it. This is what feels truly unique about Murakami's novels, and what keeps me coming back to them even though I know that they're all variations on the same themes.

Overall, this book was a 3.5 for me, in comparison with 4.5 stars for 1Q84. There were well-written, classically Murakami-esque passages throughout this novel that I enjoyed. But the writing was also stilted and awkward at times—overuse of italics, a proliferation of sentence fragments, absolutely pointless observations, and some truly uncomfortable bits that made me wonder what kind of person the author is to not only have such thoughts about women, but feel totally confident in writing them down. In addition, much of the main character's dialogue (both internal and external) consists of him repeating phrases the other person has just said as questions.

Here's an absolutely pointless observation that embodies many parts of the book that I found it a slog to read through: "The sofa was extremely comfortable, neither too hard nor too soft. The kind of sofa that naturally adjusted to whoever sat on it. Of course if you think about it (not that it was something one had to think about), [he] wasn't about to put an uncomfortable sofa in his living room."

And here's an example of the stilted writing: "We had a beautiful dish of organic vegetables and fresh isaki fish. Accompanied by white wine. [...] After that we were served a salad of lotus root, calamari, and white beans. Then a sea turtle soup. The fish dish was monkfish."

Anyway, awkward bits aside—I did enjoy reading a book that felt similar in spirit to 1Q84, which I loved enough to have read more than once. Murakami's writing does have a mystical quality that I've never encountered anywhere else, asking questions about the nature of time and reality that I find compelling; and I enjoy his off-kilter, slow-burning mysteries. But in the end, I was glad to see this over-700-page novel draw to a close.