The Commendatore Must Die

The last Murakami I finished was Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage—the one about a man who has to excavate a decade-old wound, track down the friends who expelled him from their group without explanation, and sit with the fact that some damage never fully heals. It’s quiet in the way Murakami is always quiet: deliberate, a little strange, with the surreal creeping in at the edges like light under a door. I read it in three days and thought about it for months.

So when Murakami announced in early 2017 that his next novel, Killing Commendatore, was coming out in Japan in February, I was already sold without knowing a single plot detail. I never need the plot with Murakami. His books don’t work through plot anyway—they work through atmosphere, through the accumulation of small observations, through a narrator who is always slightly adrift and always looking for something he can’t quite name. Norwegian Wood lodged itself somewhere in my chest years ago and never fully left. 1Q84 is the kind of novel that rearranges the furniture in your head. He almost won the Nobel Prize the year before and reportedly said the pressure would have undone him, which I believed immediately.

Killing Commendatore was announced as a two-part novel, which meant long, strange, and ending somewhere you didn’t expect. That’s the standing arrangement with Murakami. You agree to follow him wherever he’s going, he doesn’t promise resolution, and it’s always been worth it. I had no reason to think this time would be any different.