You don’t need to be a Murakami devotee (Harukist), to enjoy Killing Commendatore; it has many of the elements that have made him the most famous Japanese writer of his generation. Published in Japan on 24 February 2017, with the title 騎士団長殺し (Kishidanchō Goroshi), this epic novel in two volumes has already gained plenty of attention. With its first-edition printing of 1.3 million copies in Japan, and its subsequent classification as ‘indecent’ in China, readers are anticipating the new English translation.

After two consecutive novels written in the third person, Killing Commendatore charts Murakami’s return to first-person narration. In Japanese there are several first-person pronouns, and the ‘I’ in this novel uses the more formal watashi. This is a departure from Murakami’s earlier works and lends the novel some of its ethereal quality – even in the English translation. The narrator is an unnamed thirty-six-year-old portrait painter living in Tokyo. In ‘Part 1: The Idea Made Visible’, when he discovers he has been cuckolded and his wife wants a divorce, he begins an abstracted journey with no destination. Travelling through Hokkaido and pre-3/11 Tohoku, he finally settles in the vacant house of a famous Japanese artist, Tomohiko Amada, on a mountaintop in the remote area of Odawara, Kanagawa Prefecture. The lonely, isolated artist is a familiar trope in Murakami’s writing and allows for inflected moments of self-discovery in uncanny contexts. This is evident when the narrator finds one of Amada’s paintings called Killing Commendatore and believes that it depicts the gory killing of Commendatore from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, transposed to the historical Japanese setting of the Asuka Era (552–645ce). It is from this point that the novel subtly shifts from a realist to surrealist narrative, as nightly the narrator is woken by the incessant ringing of a bell. After searching the property, he discovers that the noise originates from underneath rocks near a Shinto shrine. Around the same time, the narrator is commissioned to paint Wataru Menshiki’s portrait. Menshiki is a mysterious, retired IT baron who lives across the mountain from Amada’s house. When Menshiki hears the bell, he recalls Ueda Akinari’s Tales of the Spring Rain, specifically the story ‘The Destiny That Spanned Two Lifetimes’, where a farmer finds a sokushinbutsu (a self-mummified Budd- hist monk). Menshiki hires landscapers to excavate the site; they find nothing but a bell inside the well-like cavern.

Murakami has a preoccupation with wells and has famously stated, ‘it is my lifetime dream to be sitting at the bottom of a well’, expressing his desire for isolation. But the well also serves as a space between worlds in Murakami’s books, so when the narrator takes the bell into Amada’s art studio, he is visited by a two-foot-tall man who calls himself an ‘Idea’ but who looks like the Commendatore in the painting. In ‘Part 2: The Shifting Metaphor’, the novel slips into double metaphors and ambiguities, as Murakami’s beguiling breed of magical realism plays with the reader’s sense of corporality and fantasy.

Haruki Murakami (photo via Penguin)Intertextuality is a key feature of this novel, and the echoes of other texts haunt not only the plot but also some of the more lyrical passages of incurvate writing. In addition to Don Giovanni and Akinari’s short story, Killing Commendatore references Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Bluebeard’s Castle, and, in Murakami’s own words, pays homage to The Great Gatsby. Indeed, Murakami has an enduring relationship with Fitzgerald’s classic. He translated it into Japanese and has used it as an intertext in many of his other works. While the character of Menshiki is supposed to be a kind of Jay Gatsby figure, and some of the wasteland of the valley of the ashes may be referenced in various parts of the novel, it is unlikely without the promotional material and Murakami’s obiter dictum that the reader would be aware of this connection.

Importantly, Killing Commendatore is considered a controversial book for its references to Auschwitz and the Nanjing Massacre. In his conversation with the narrator, Menshiki acknowledges the Japanese military’s massacre of Chinese citizens and soldiers who had already surrendered. Murakami has stated:

Because history is the collective memory of a nation, I think it is a grave mistake to forget about the past or to replace memory with something else. We must fight [against historical revisionism]. Novelists are limited in what we can do, but it is possible for us to fight such forces in the form of storytelling.

Murakami won’t win the Nobel Prize this year, but in his exposure of Japanese wartime atrocities he bravely lobbies for historical reconciliation.