Mozart at Work in Killing Commendatore
Reading Note: Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami
This essay discusses the novel in full, including its ending.
The narrator of Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore is running through his savings, teaching art classes that cannot cover even his reduced expenses, and failing to find anything he wants to paint. His agent offers him a portrait commission with an unusually generous fee. He hesitates. He has abandoned that kind of work, along with the marriage and life in which it belonged.
What draws his hand back into motion is someone else’s painting. He is staying in the mountain home of Tomohiko Amada, an elderly artist now living in a nursing home, and has discovered a concealed work called Killing Commendatore. Its scene comes from Mozart’s Don Giovanni, recast in ancient Japanese dress. After weeks of looking, he begins making pencil sketches of its five figures, struggling to translate their flat, linear forms into the Western pictorial language he knows. The attempt gives him something to do. Another portrait begins to seem possible.
The combination feels remarkably natural even though its ingredients, listed separately, sound familiar: a blocked painter, a wealthy stranger, an absent master, mysterious happenings, Mozart. Murakami gives them work to perform for one another. The copying and the fee converge on the same practical need to get the painter’s hands moving. A scene from an opera enters the decision to earn a living, and its later demands grow from that modest beginning.
Menshiki’s portrait and the dinner invitation
The client, Wataru Menshiki, turns out to live across the valley. While the portrait is in progress, a bell sounds at night beneath a pile of stones near a small shrine. Menshiki can afford to investigate. Four workers and a compact backhoe arrive, the stones are shifted, and a carefully constructed pit is uncovered.
Murakami pauses over the workers’ procedures while the narrator feels his ability to intervene slipping away. People have been hired; money is changing hands; the operation has begun. His wish to stop it runs up against an arrangement already in motion. We feel a pressure that would exist on an entirely ordinary worksite, even as the machine uncovers something that exceeds ordinary explanation.
Menshiki’s wealth acquires a precise narrative function here. The portrait has brought him close enough to become involved, and his resources enable a discovery the narrator could hardly have managed alone. When the painter worries about the delay to his commission, the client gives the excavation priority. The paid job has generated a relationship capable of interrupting the job.
Its completion produces another opportunity. Menshiki proposes a celebratory dinner, and the narrator jokingly suggests inviting whoever rang the bell: perhaps the vanished mummy they expected to find below the stones. He compares the invitation to the one Don Giovanni issues to the Commendatore’s statue. Menshiki joins in, willing to accommodate an invisible guest and already considering dessert.
The joke soon becomes binding. A small figure appears in the form of the painted Commendatore and identifies himself as an Idea. He has borrowed this appearance; the figure in Amada’s painting remains where it was. His powers come with restrictions. He cannot enter a place without an invitation, and he thanks Menshiki for helping open the pit. The excavation and the dinner conversation have done separate pieces of necessary work: one releases him, the other gives him somewhere to go.
At dinner, an empty place is set, but the Commendatore sits on a display shelf behind Menshiki. He is too short to be properly visible at the table. He does not eat, and the painter watches him watching the meal. A supernatural guest still has to find somewhere suitable to sit. The smallness copied from Amada’s painted figure has become a condition of his existence, with consequences that continue beyond this faintly comic accommodation.
This is part of the pleasure of Murakami’s combination. A passing remark can take effect later, while a fantastic being carries the inconvenience of its particular shape. We begin to remember details for what they might permit or obstruct. The novel makes its strange world usable before making it fully intelligible.
Don Giovanni in a borrowed body
The dinner also changes the work performed by the opera’s returning guest. In Mozart and Lorenzo Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, the commander dies after challenging Giovanni to a duel. Later, Giovanni mocks his statue and invites it to dinner. The returned commander refuses mortal food, demands a reciprocal commitment, takes Giovanni’s hand and calls on him to repent. Giovanni refuses, and the scene ends in fire and his descent.
At Menshiki’s dinner, that formidable visitor has become an observer perched among the furnishings. The Commendatore gathers impressions without judging the host. Murakami retains the invitation and the encounter with a figure from beyond ordinary life, then allows the occasion to proceed through food, conversation and hospitality. The inherited threat remains available to our imagination, even while the guest’s conduct gives it a different direction.
Amada’s painting had already made room for such changes. Donna Anna, the commander’s daughter, watches her father’s death in the picture, although she has gone indoors before the duel in the opera. There is also a fifth figure with no equivalent in the libretto: Long Face, peering out through a square opening in the ground. His position troubles the painter’s account of the composition. The odd addition will become the figure capable of opening an underground passage.
When Mariye, a young student in the narrator’s art class, disappears, the painting becomes something he is instructed to enact. In Amada’s nursing-home room, the Idea asks the narrator to kill him as Don Giovanni kills the commander. This will summon Long Face and make an underground passage accessible. The watcher at the edge of the image has acquired an action on which the rest depends.
There is an awkward problem with the reenactment. The Commendatore’s sword was made for his tiny hand, and the painter cannot grip its handle. That smallness, already responsible for the seat on the shelf, now prevents obedience to the picture. A knife appears in a drawer: the knife Amada’s son Masahiko had used to prepare fish at the narrator’s house. The painter can grip this knife and drive it into the small body. Repetition requires a substitution.
Consent introduces a further change. The original commander calls Giovanni to account after being killed; Murakami’s Idea asks for the killing itself, offering his death as a means of helping others. Yet that offer provides little comfort once the knife enters him. The narrator feels living flesh resist. The Idea has agreed, but the body it inhabits struggles against extinction. He has to overcome that struggle by force.
Murakami gives embodiment its own claim here. Calling the figure an Idea does not make the blood or resistance inconsequential; the narrator’s effort to regard his act as purely symbolic fails against what his hands encounter. The invitation allowed him to share a meal with an impossible being. Now the same borrowed presence requires him to experience the difficulty of destroying a body.
The opera’s sequence of killing, supernatural return and judgment has become a passage through representation into action, with the invited being participating in the choice of what happens next. The descent that follows is undertaken in the hope of finding a missing child. Those changed functions open possibilities the original dramatic sequence does not pursue, while the bodily violence keeps the new purpose from becoming an easy promise of redemption.
Mariye’s escape and the painter’s return
Murakami sometimes presses the connection harder than its construction needs. Before the killing, the Commendatore explains Amada’s painting through the artist’s wartime experiences and insists that the events have been determined beforehand. The long explanation asks us to accept a necessity the earlier copying, payment and invitation had allowed us to experience for ourselves. Even the knife’s reappearance can feel convenient: the useful household tool is waiting in precisely the drawer where the urgent scene needs it.
The complaint that the final journey feels “rushed and forced” has force at these joins. The invitation has been carefully prepared, and the sword’s unusable handle carries forward an established physical constraint; the assurance that everything belongs to a predetermined design has a more insistent sound. The novel is most convincing where an earlier act makes a later one possible. Its declarations of destiny leave less room for us to discover the relation.
Mariye’s account further complicates the promise of rescue. She has been hiding inside Menshiki’s house, where the Commendatore earlier protected and advised her as far as his limited powers permitted. He directed her to a safer room, then told her she would have to manage on her own. While she waits there, the narrator kills him and descends underground. The retrospective narration explicitly synchronizes those events.
But Mariye eventually gets out by watching for an ordinary opportunity. The cleaning crew arrives, Menshiki appears to have left, and the gate stands open. She tidies away the evidence of her stay and slips out. Her alertness puts the Commendatore’s advice into practice. The narrator has undertaken his ordeal intending to help her; the novel leaves the causal connection between his passage and her escape unresolved.
He, meanwhile, emerges inside the pit, with no ladder and no means of climbing its smooth walls. He rings the bell until Menshiki hears it and comes to help. The painter is hungry and freezing; Menshiki lowers a ladder, then pulls him out by the wrist.
The retrospective account leaves us with two people who have made it home and no settled explanation of how their journeys connect. It also gives the client’s resources a changed purpose. Earlier, Menshiki paid to investigate a mystery; now he brings a ladder and lends his strength to someone who cannot get out. The opera has opened a new path through the painting, but the person who takes it still depends on another human being to complete his return.
Sources
Haruki Murakami, Killing Commendatore, translated by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, Knopf, 2018. The reading centers on the copying, excavation and dinner sequences, the reenactment and underground passage, and Mariye’s later account.
Lorenzo Da Ponte, Don Giovanni, opera by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, KV 527. Digital Mozart Edition, Stiftung Mozarteum Salzburg, critical libretto edition; Prague 1787 text. Opening duel, graveyard invitation and final encounter.
M. A. Orthofer, review of Killing Commendatore, The Complete Review, August 21, 2018. The criticism of the final journey as rushed and forced is tested here against the prepared invitation, physical constraints and separate account of Mariye’s escape.
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