The Diary Game 03/02/2022 - Three Books Fom Murakami's Magical Universe. 1.Killing Commendatore.

alein (70)memberAquilain Italy • 2 years ago

Ever since I discovered it, from A Wild Sheep Chase, I've had the feeling that Murakami comes out of any graphic and top in which you could arrange the writers, objectively or subjectively.

The strange, supernatural world that this absolutely brilliant writer is able to create is at that boundary between dream and wakefulness, when you slip with one foot into the place where everything is possible and one still remains, for a short time, rooted in the real world. Where the imagination begins to fly, mixing anxieties and hopes, friendly faces and monsters, curiosities and paralyzing fears. Where everything is possible and almost nothing explainable and where a boundless restlessness keeps you tense until you feel like you have a muscle fever.

I was expecting a theme that would at least reach the military in the Killing Commendatore, but ...

I was expecting a topic that would at least touch on the military, in Killing Commendatore, but when were things so simple and natural about Murakami, when was he ever predictable?

Set in contemporary Japan, the story in which Murakami draws you this time is that of a 36-year-old man, an abstract painter in college, who failed after graduation in the well-paid “art” of portraying businessmen and personalities in various fields. Abandoned over night by his wife he thought he had a life with... almost perfect. Monotonous, routine, but without loose seams, where the beautiful feelings could have flowed.

His temporary solution to the crisis is to leave, with a minimum of personal belongings, the marital home and run away from the woman who hurt him, in a long, aimless journey, a journey of self-abandonment, made in a state of semi-mortality and which has as final point the relocation in the house in the mountains of a friend.

The mountain house of this friend's father, in fact, to be "true to the story", which father, a famous nihonga painter, a traditional Japanese style, "no longer makes the difference between an opera and a frying pan" and is hospitalized , with senile dementia, in an asylum.

Here in the mountains, reality slips through his fingers like a fine cloth, with the appearance of Menshiki, a rich and eccentric businessman who convinces him to make his portrait - although he had announced to his agent that he was no longer taking orders - for a noticeably high remuneration.

Menshiki has a hidden purpose and the money needed to achieve it.

Menshiki has charm, speech and solutions when the painter begins to hear, in the middle of the night, the sound of a bell that not only seems to come, but even comes from the earth, from under the mound of stones behind an old hokora temple built in the forest of behind the house, a harmless mini-altar during the day and downright sinister in the moonlight.

A Mummy Caught Between the Worlds, Like Us Between Murakami's Real and Supernatural Plans

Who's ringing the bell? According to a legend, it could be the spirit of a monk buried alive, willingly, to attain nirvana through spiritual purification. A mummy trapped between worlds like ours between Murakami's real and supernatural plans ...

You can almost hear the sound of the excavator as things move to uncover the pit, you can feel the grass lying down and you see the pit yawning. Extremely visual, the Japanese's writing effortlessly lays before your eyes, like in a movie, people, places, things.

And then, it's no longer difficult, but just bizarre, to see how the commander comes out of a painting, how the young artist's paintings come to life, dictating the path of the brush and revealing the secrets of those who serve as a model or how an opening in the floor the transition from our world to an underground one that could very well be the one beyond...

For since the opening of the pit, the strangeness has followed one another without stopping, but perfectly twinned.

Not only the young painter, but also the old and senile, with his hidden past even his family, Menshiki and his possible daughter, the passing mistresses of the portraitist and, from time to time, are attracted to the funnel through which one world flows instead, his dead sister, tying things up or explaining some of his landmarks and choices in life.

Murakami Doesn't Feel the Need to Explain Many of His Strange Things.

To say that Killing Commendatore is totally captivating is an understatement. I did not detach myself from it until my eyes began to sting from reading so much, and after two days I closed volume 2. I realized then that Ana's January pile of possibilities is really possible, on one condition: all but absolutely all the books chosen to take you hostage as Murakami's work took me.

There is a lot to tell about "Killing Commendatore", but here I do not summarize, but only give you the pill or the "eat me" cookie that should make you want to enter, in turn, the unique, fantastic world. of this wizard of words. So I stop.