In the opera, Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore, who is the father of a woman he has attempted to seduce, after the old man tries to block his escape from the family house. It turns out to be a representation of a scene in Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” with the characters dressed in the style of seventh-century Japanese courtiers. He is now in a nursing home, suffering from dementia.Īfter a period of “producing nothingness,” listening to Amada’s collection of classical LPs and conducting an emotionally uninvolving affair with a local married woman, the narrator finds one of Amada’s paintings rolled up in the attic. By contrast, Tomohiko Amada, the painter whose house he’s renting, was a major artist, who turned from Western-style “cutting-edge modern oil paintings” to Japanese-style work after getting involved in an abortive political assassination as a student in 1930s Vienna. In “Killing Commendatore,” this man is a portrait painter who makes a living from commissions but has no deep connection to the work he makes. Over the course of Murakami’s 17 previous books of fiction, readers have become familiar with “Murakami man,” a listless, socially isolated guy whose interests tend to circle around music, books, home cooking and cats, and whose lack of anchor in the everyday world often precipitates a sort of slippage into a netherworld of ghosts and spirits. He’s talking about his wife, whose decision to divorce him has precipitated his flight from Tokyo to the mountains of Kanagawa Prefecture, where he is staying in a house that once belonged to a famous painter.

“We’d lived under the same roof for six years, yet I knew next to nothing about this woman,” explains the narrator of “Killing Commendatore,” Haruki Murakami’s overlong and somewhat undercooked tale of supernatural happenings in rural Japan. KILLING COMMENDATORE By Haruki Murakami Translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen 681 pp.

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