Killing Commendatore

After his wife tells him she wants a divorce, the narrator — a portrait painter who has spent years producing technically accomplished but spiritually empty commissioned portraits — abandons Tokyo and drives north until his car stops. Eventually he settles in a house in the mountains above Odawara that belongs to the famous Japanese-style painter Tomohiko Amada, now in a nursing home with dementia. In the attic, wrapped in brown paper, he finds a canvas that Amada apparently completed and immediately hid: a Japanese-style painting depicting a scene from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, titled ‘Killing Commendatore’.

A mysterious bell begins ringing from a sealed pit behind the house at two in the morning. The narrator opens the pit. What emerges is an Idea — a two-foot-tall figure dressed as the Commendatore from the painting, a metaphysical entity that has crossed from the realm of concepts into physical form.

Killing Commendatore is the most art-saturated of Murakami’s novels — a meditation on what artists actually do and what they give up when they do it for money, filtered through Japanese-style painting, Mozart, and the mythology of descent and return. Long and unhurried, it is best read in the spirit of the mountain retreat at its centre: without urgency.

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What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set Killing Commendatore apart: The art-world setting gives it fresh material; The mythological underpinning (Don Giovanni, Idea figures) is handled with subtlety; and The mountain retreat setting is beautifully atmospheric. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of Killing Commendatore give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Art as both subject and structure — what a painting can contain that reality cannot. The pit in the woods as Murakami’s descent-into-the-underworld motif. Mozart’s Don Giovanni as the novel’s hidden spine. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Haruki Murakami’s prose in Killing Commendatore is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

At 700 pages, slower than his best long novels. The middle sections can lose momentum. Less emotionally urgent than 1Q84 or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Committed Murakami readers; readers interested in art and representation

Publication and Setting

Killing Commendatore was published in Japan in two volumes in 2017 and translated into English by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen in 2018. At over 700 pages, it is one of Murakami’s longest novels. The narrative centres on an unnamed portrait painter who retreats to a house in the mountains after his marriage collapses — a house that belonged to the recently deceased Nihon-ga painter Tomohiko Amada — and discovers a strange canvas hidden in the attic: a painting of a scene from Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni in which the Commendatore is killed by Don Giovanni. This painting, and the bell ringing from a pit in the woods nearby, set the novel’s uncanny machinery in motion.

The Operatic Understructure

The relationship between Killing Commendatore and Don Giovanni is not merely decorative. The opera’s central triangle — the seducer, the father who tries to defend his daughter’s honour, and the supernatural revenge that follows — provides the novel’s thematic scaffolding. Murakami has spoken of his longstanding interest in Mozart, and the novel is one of several in his work in which classical music carries metaphysical weight. The figure of the Commendatore, who appears in the painter’s house as a two-foot-tall “Idea” in Heian-period court dress, is among the more memorable of Murakami’s supernatural visitors — philosophical rather than threatening, interested in the nature of forms and representations. The novel was critically well-received in Japan and in English translation, though some reviewers noted its structural resemblance to The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

Murakami and Art

Killing Commendatore is the only Murakami novel in which the narrator’s profession — portrait painting — is both the subject and the structural model. The act of painting a person, of deciding what to put in and what to leave out, of choosing which truth to capture and which to conceal, is what the novel is ultimately about. Murakami’s interest in art as a form of selective representation recurs throughout his fiction, but here it becomes the controlling metaphor: what we paint of ourselves and what we paint of others are never the same thing.

The novel’s title comes from the painting found in the attic: a Japanese-style canvas depicting the opening scene of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni, in which Don Giovanni kills the Commendatore — the father of Donna Anna — in a duel provoked by his own attempted seduction. Mozart’s opera is itself a work about desire and its consequences, about transgression and supernatural punishment, and Murakami draws on the opera’s dramatic structure without making the parallels schematic. The Commendatore who appears in the narrator’s house is not a punishing supernatural figure but a philosophical one: curious about the narrator, invested in his development, less concerned with vengeance than with understanding.

The novel was translated into English by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen in 2018 and received as a characteristically rich if somewhat slow-moving late Murakami.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 3.9/5 — A rich, unhurried Murakami — part Don Giovanni, part Japanese fairy tale, part meditation on art and representation — that rewards the patience it demands.