Under the Murakami Spell: Truth and Power in Negative Space

Killing Commendatore, Haruki Murakami's fourteenth novel and nineteenth book of fiction, begins with a "faceless man" who appears to the unnamed narrator as he wakes from a nap, asking for his portrait to be drawn. When he vanishes, the narrator thinks, "If this was a dream, then the world I'm living in itself must all be a dream." Even more inscrutable is the next line: "Maybe someday I'll be able to draw a portrait of nothingness."

The narrator is a portrait painter, his clients the "so-called pillars of society" who seek his talents and pay him handsomely. Despite that, he does the work "reluctantly" since it's not the artistic path he originally pursued as a young man. At thirty-six, he's found himself at a crossroads: "I should have washed my hands of that person I'd become. I should have stood up and done something about it." We promptly learn why: His wife is leaving him and has asked him not to ask her why. In his confusion and grief, he takes off on a months-long road trip and eventually comes to rest in the mountains outside Odawara, in central Japan, in a cabin owned by his friend's father, a famous painter. It is here that he decides to retire from his portraits and return to the kind of painting that most matters to him. In essence, he hopes to find his "real self." In the mirror, he sees only "a virtual fragment of myself that had been split in two. The self there was the one I hadn't chosen."

It's also here that the story becomes ever more Murakamian. The narrator strikes up an uneasy friendship with the mysterious millionaire who lives Gatsby-style in the white mansion across the valley. He's visited regularly by two girlfriends, one of whom investigates the millionaire's shady past for him. He discovers a mesmerizingly violent painting hidden in the attic, painted long ago by the cabin's owner. He is offered an outrageous sum by the millionaire to paint the portrait of a thirteen-year-old girl in town who might be the millionaire's daughter. Then an ominous bell starts ringing in the forest at night, always at the same time. Then he and the millionaire unearth an underground chamber in the forest which contains the bell but not the bell-ringer. Then a character from the violent painting comes to life, a two-foot gremlin who speaks in riddles and refers to the narrator as "our friends."

This is all a mere third of the way through this nearly 700-page novel. If you'd read more than a few of Murakami's works going into Killing Commendatore, you wouldn't be alone in your déjà vu. Most reviews of his novels over the past two decades make this very point. Yet dismissing this one for its unabashed Murakamianness might be to dismiss the very thing that makes the Murakami world a dark, dry well worth descending over and over. I've been reading and rereading him for twenty years, having made my way through nearly all those nineteen books, and I still find it hard to explain both why he's infuriating and why he remains one of my favorite writers.

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I first heard his name when I arrived at my MFA program in sleepy Iowa City. I was twenty-four, with a Bachelor's and Master's in English and a reading of contemporary literature limited woefully to the Western writers my English professors had canonized for me. So I was intrigued by this Japanese writer whom my classmates—in workshop, at the bar, at parties—were proselytizing with giddy devotion, as though they were part of some underground society of hipster bookworms.

My first try was the book that made Murakami so famous he fled Japan: Norwegian Wood, a slim...