Killing Commendatore: Haruki Murakami

You could also say: more of the same. Some interesting characters, a long winding story in the mountains north of Odawara, some reference to the Sino-Japanese war and the occupation of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, some trivia about music classical, Jazz and Rock music and – of course – the supernatural, mystery ghost story. The narrator is a rather successful and well to do portrait painter and lives with his wife Juzu in the posh Hiroo district of Tokyo. His wife informs him, that she wants to separate from him and quite stunned – he packs a few things into his old Peugeot and hits the road north, roaming the northers provinces of Honshu for a few weeks. Finally, he ends up in the atelier of Tomohiko Amada, a famous painter of traditional Japanese paintings, who had to quit his home because of deteriorating health and dementia. Here the main story unfolds. The narrator discovers an unknown painting in the attic of his new temporary home called “The Killing of Commendatore”. He is befriended by a rich former businessman named Menshiki Wataru who lives in a huge modern mansion across the valley from his home and he gets to know the Akikawa family, also in the neighborhood. Between these a mysterious or rather magic storyline evolves: we learn some parts of Tomohiko Amada’s biography in Vienna in 1938, we learn about the death of Tomohiko’s younger brother after the massacre of Nanjing and there is one long storyline with a heavy reference to Greek mythology and the underworld. In the end the narrator muses over the fact that we all live our lives carrying secrets we cannot disclose. With nearly 700 pages this is a long read and a lot of secrets are disclosed to the reader, while the characters in the plot remain oblivious to most of the important ones.

Wie immer, sehr schön geschrieben, unterhaltsam und fesselnd. Und der Schluß lässt genügend Raum, um die Geschichte selbst weiter zu spinnen....Vielleicht nicht das beste Werk von Murakami, aber auf jeden Fall lesenswert!