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Wawancara Killing Commendatore
Wawancara Killing Commendatore
The novel marks the first time in a while that Murakami has written
in the first person. It is written in the voice of a 36-year-old painter
whose wife left him abruptly.
"At first, I always wrote in the first person, and gradually shifted to
the third person," Murakami said. "Having achieved a novel totally in
the third-person with '1Q84,' I felt the urge to return to the first
person. There was a strong sense that I was returning to my roots,
but I think there was a certain maturing of the protagonist as well."
"I was drawn to the peculiarity of the words," he said. "What I had
first was the title, and the place where the story takes place, which
is atop a hill in (the Kanagawa Prefecture city of) Odawara. The
protagonist became a painter as I was writing."
The painter -- separated from his wife and searching for something
to paint amid his feelings of loss -- finds himself living in a house
which belongs to the father of a friend. The father, aged 92, is a
renowned Japanese-style painter who now lives in a seniors' home,
thus leaving his house empty and available for the protagonist. It is
after the protagonist discovers a painting titled "Killing
Commendatore" in the attic that he becomes entangled in a cryptic
series of events.
The protagonist hears a bell ringing in the middle of the night, and in
his search for the source of the sound, he comes upon a well-like
hole in the ground. With Menshiki's cooperation, the protagonist
unseals the hole, in which he finds an old bell, the likes of which
would be found in a Buddhist altar. As is addressed in the novel
itself, the story surrounding the bell is a motif taken from Edo-period
novelist Ueda Akinari's short story, "Nise no Enishi" ("A bond for two
lifetimes"), which is included in Ueda's collection of short stories,
"Harusame Monogatari" ("The tale of spring rain").
"My novels are open-ended, or have mostly ended with the stories
still wide open," Murakami explained. "This time, I realized that I'd
begun to need a 'sense of closure.' For me, the fact that the
protagonist decides at the end to live with the child is to suggest a
new kind of conclusion."
The backdrop against which this shift occurred was a trip that
Murakami took in the fall of 2015, in which he drove along the coast
from Fukushima to Miyagi prefectures, the area hit hardest by the
March 2011 earthquake and tsunami.
"I believe the disaster in the Tohoku region left a huge scar on the
Japanese people's psyche. To portray the psyche of the people who
lived through this particular time without parts that overlap (with
the disaster) is unrealistic."