Quanta Reads

Haruki Murakami

“It was still pitch black when I woke up. I couldn’t see my finger when I waved it in front of my face. The darkness blotted out the line between sleep and wakefulness as well. Where did one end and the other begin, and which side was I on? I dragged out my bag of memories and began flipping through them, as if counting a stack of gold coins: the black cat that had been our pet; my old Peugeot 205; Menshiki’s white mansion; the record Der Rosenkavalier; the plastic penguin. I was able to call up memories of each in great detail. My mind was working okay — the Double Metaphor hadn’t devoured it. It’s just that I had been in total darkness for so long that I was having trouble drawing a line between the world of sleep and the waking world.”

I was first introduced to Murakami’s literature in college. A guy I was friends with from the CS department in FAST NUCES was an avid reader and he knew that I was one too. So he lent me a couple of books on various topics to bury myself in through the winter break. The first book I chose was Norwegian Wood. This was the moment I crossed the threshold of presence vs absence in Murakami’s words. It was a world unlike any I had ever experienced. At that point, I had become familiar with works of fiction from a lot of different authors but Murakami’s world was somehow a different sort of magic. I don’t think I have experienced one quite like it in any other work of writing. But then again, my exposure to literature is quite limited so who knows.

In any case, I was drawn to the way he built these worlds. His characters all had a certain magnetism to them. This is probably why when i spotted another one of his works while staying over at my boyfriends place I asked to borrow it without second thought. That one was 1Q84.

Suffice to say, this year when I quit my horrible sales job after 5 years and decided to enter a bookshop – The first author I looked for was Haruki Murakami. I think I probably cleaned out his entire collection from the shelves. This is how I get. If I am interested in something I go from breadth to depth quite quickly.

I don’t know why I chose Killing Commendatore as my first read from the collection. Maybe it had something to do with the viciousness of the title. In my mind, this however did not bring about the usual connotations of violence. Violence in Murakami’s world is very layered, with a lot of subtext and subtleties to it.

The book begins with the author suddenly finding himself at the cusp of existential confusion. His wife of four years that he was very much in love with suddenly announces her wish to separate based on a dream she had. Imagine that. You meet someone you immediately feel drawn to, spend days and weeks and months trying to woo them and manage to marry them… You have finally settled into a blissful routine of blending days into each other in a quiet sort of happiness. And one day it all vanishes in a puff of smoke. Because the love of your life had a weird dream that they do not even want to talk about.

I should mention at this point that our nameless protagonist is a painter. Graduating Art School – he, like many of his mates at the school had dreams of bypassing masters of the bygone era and carve his name in the art world. The Universe though, had other plans for him. He fell in love and wanted to provide for his wife so he bagan taking commissions for commercial portraits. When his world crumbles in front of his eyes he feels as if he is standing in a sandstorm with no sense of direction. Unable to decide how he was feeling or what he wanted to do, he packs a few of his possessions into his old car and drives off to an unknown destination with his small tent and many tangled thoughts.

As I gazed at my reflection I wondered. Where am I headed? Before that, though, the question was Where have I come to? Where is this place? No, before that even I needed to ask, Who the hell am I?

As I stared at myself in the mirror, I thought about what it would be like to paint my own portrait. Say I were to try, what sort of self would I end up painting? Would I be able to find even a shred of affection for myself? Would I be able to discover even one thing shining within me?

There’s this interesting phenomenon about Japanese men. They are not very expressive. Hardly ever show any emotions on the most part. You can psycho-analyze it all you want but I feel like it has more to do with their history and culture. Japanese people have quite a history of martial arts and discipline. The values of keeping your temper, being proper in all situations and holding on to your private thoughts and emotions are all instilled in their core personalities. So our protagonist does not utter a single emotion filled word to his now completely detached wife. Someone he thought he knew best in the world.

Cut to the moment he receives an offer to stay as a caretaker at his friends fathers house secluded in the mountains. His friend Masahiko studied with him at the Art School and is the son of a kind of legend painter of that era, “Tomohiko Amada”. The narrator arrives at this secluded western style house where Amada spent most of his later years by himself focused on one thing alone, painting.

If we had to present a defining moment where everything changed for the narrator, it would be one where he discovers Tomohiko Amada’s painting Killing Commendatore. Its a Japanese style painting depicting the murder of Don Giovanni by a young man. This happenstance is witnessed by Donna Anna (Don Giovanni’s daughter), a servant and an abnormal figure appearing from a lid opening through a fissure in the ground. The abnormal figure has a weird head and face, shaped like an elongated eggplant.

Such is the end of the evildoer: the death of a sinner always reflects his life.

Questo e il fin di chi fa mal, e de’ perfidi la morte alla vita e sempre ugual

Its imperative that you read the two Act story of Don Giovanni which was presented as an Opera by Mozart, premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the National Theatre (of Bohemia), now called the Estates Theatre, on 29 October 1787. This will help you build parallels to the painting Amada creates and the reasoning behind this choice.

As the narrator dives deep into the life and history of Amada, he discovers that Amada used to study in Vienna during the 1930s during the peak of Nazi rule. It turns out that Amada was part of an anti-Nazi student organization and involved in a plot to murder a commander in the Nazi forces alongside his paramour who was later tortured to death. Since Amada belonged to an influential Japanese family, he was forced to repatriate to Japan and because of some unknown incidents, the entire incident was buried. Amada himself had been sworn to eternal silence regarding the whole thing.

During that time, Amada gets holed up in his mountain estate and spends a lot of years painting. Since his return from Vienna, one very significant thing happens. He changes his western style of painting to Japanese style. Now, those of you who have read the book can relate to how disillusioned Amada had become with the western world and began appreciating his origins and roots. One can also say that he wanted to sever all psychological and emotional ties from what happened in Vienna. Apparently he also had been tortured before his release and to know that everyone you ever loved or cared about in a place were inhumanly slaughtered tends to leave traces that are very hard to get rid of.

Its quite an interestingly subtle representation of how trauma shapes people and the kind of transformations it inspires. Needless to say, the painting he did of the Don Giovanni Acts was an attempt of his psyche to express the intense pain and suffering he had experienced at the hands of the Nazi regime. The murder depicted in the painting was not portrayed in a detached way. The blood over flowing from the wound in the Commendatore’s torso was bright and vibrant. The murderers face was not contorted with rage but was composed of a quiet calm and resolution. As if the act, brutal as it was – was extremely necessary and had to be done by someone.

Turning back to the over arching plot of the book, it would not be a Murakami work if there aren’t any supernatural elements. At this point, i would just be discussing the most interesting ideas depicted in the book rather than going into detail of what actually happened.

Character Analysis of Menshiki

Menshiki is one of the most focal characters of the book and he has this almost guttural form of attraction to him. There is this moment when Mariye (his possible daughter) is hiding in the closet of the mysterious room where no one was allowed to enter and the spectral Commendatore (The idea that borrowed the Commendatore’s form) says something to her:

“Is Mr. Menshiki dangerous?” – “A very hard question to answer,” the Commendatore said. He made an exaggerated frown. “Menshiki himself is not an evil man. He is a decent sort, one could say, with abilities that exceed those of most people. There is even a hint of nobility in him, if one looks hard enough. Yet there is a gap in his heart, an empty space that attracts the abnormal and the dangerous. It is there the problem lies.” – “Who was the person standing outside the closet door?” she asked. “Was that Menshiki?” – “It was Menshiki, but at the same time it was not Menshiki.” – “Is he aware of any of this?” – “Most likely,” the Commendatore said. “Most likely. But there’s nothing he can do about it.

I feel like this is one of the most revealing and metaphysically interesting incidents of the book. The other being when the narrator descends in the underworld but we’ll come to that later.

Lets first retrace our steps back to what we know about Mr. Menshiki. Little is known about his early, formative years but we do have some information about the way he led his life in adulthood. It is surmised that he might have had a wealthy but isolated upbringing. Sometime during his adulthood he ran a tech company and accumulated a lot of wealth. He trades stocks as a hobby. He had a girlfriend that he loved but was averse to the idea of marriage. We know that his girlfriend left him because she wanted to have a family and later dies due to a severe allergic reaction caused by a Hornet’s sting. She left a daughter that Menshiki believes to be his. He forced out residents of the mansion facing the daughter Mariye’s house on the mountains. These two houses apparently lie in close proximity of Amada’s house in Odawara.

We also know that Menshiki has an impeccable fashion sense, appreciates classical music and is very meticulous when it comes to cleanliness and organization. We also hear a remark about this from the narrator that it would be almost impossible to live with a person like that. I do not doubt it.

So far, nothing about his personality betrays any sort of inherent darkness. He hasn’t committed any evil acts that we know of. Although, all we know of him about his relationship with Mariye’s mother is entirely based on his own account and nothing is known of how the woman perceived it. Through his interactions with the narrator, we don’t really see anything that is strikingly alarming you know? Although, there was one incident when the narrator decides not to finish Mariye’s painting and gives it to Mariye instead because according to him, “Menshiki would move heaven and earth to get his hands on the painting” and for some reason the narrator finds this idea really disturbing.

So then, why exactly is the mere presence of Menshiki or something that is Menshiki but not really Menshiki at the same time so sinister? Why was the spectral Commendatore so concerned about Mariye’s safety in that mansion? Why did the narrator have to descend to the underground to retrieve Mariye from a dark place metaphorically speaking?

The Commendatore even orchestrates his own murder in order to obtain a sort of ticket for the narrator to be able to siphon out the eggplant figure from the underground so that an opening to it is finally accessible. Which is of course also intricately related to Tomohiko Amada himself.

You know you have ventured about a great piece of literature if it leaves you with a thousand unanswered questions and inspires endless introspection.

The latent darkness inside Menshiki

We have here a person in their 50s, living isolated on top of a mountain with endless wealth and an almost psychotic obsession with a teenage girl who might or might not be their offspring. Menshiki watches the house incessantly with high powered binoculars to get a glimpse of said teenager. Mariye somehow fell upon this feeling that she was being watched and even before that she felt something deeply unsettling about Menshiki in their first ever encounter. It is not entirely incomprehensible that Mariye would feel that way given how women are just biologically attuned to scan for threats in their environment. This was the precursor for why she goes to Menshiki’s mansion in the first place.

We can begin to have an inkling of what this means. Could it be that Menshiki’s obsession with Mariye, wanting to be close to her at literally any cost could have awoken some latent darkness inside of him? Its entirely possible. Before we venture into this any further, I feel like we ought to discuss the descent into the underworld that the narrator went through in order to link the world of double metaphors to Menshiki’s latent personality.

Descent into the underworld

There is a famous psychologist and psycho-analyst named Carl Jung whose work speaks volumes about the depths of the human psyche, the collective unconscious and the recurring theme of descending into our unconscious to slay dragons that I feel is very relevant to what happens to the narrator.

First, a little backstory of the narrator himself.

The narrator loses his sister when she was 12 years of age due to complications related to her heart condition. By his account, she was a very lively young person who was eternally optimistic and would keep on making elaborate plans for her future despite understanding the severity of her condition. The relationship between the narrator and his sister was a very sweet and intimate one. He was her protector and best friend and she represented a sort of anchor in his small world around which everything else revolved.

They say that incidents like death or suffering of a family member is something none of us are prepared to handle. Very few families can recover from such a traumatic experience. Families and bonds disintegrate after you come upon the harsh realization that there are very few things you can realistically to do protect the ones you love. The aftermath is like that of a natural disaster. An entire psychic space destroyed and very few people have the courage or human capacity to re-build from the ashes. Until the little girl named Komichi was alive, the narrator had a relatively stable and happy family. After Komichi dies, its like there is a void in the space that they can neither avoid nor destroy. Her room is left exactly as it was with her personal belongings. In essence, it was an attempt of sorts to preserve the idea of her existence in their lives. Nothing would be quite the same afterwords. The family grows despondent and the biggest impact seems to be on the narrator. Although, to be fair we don’t really know how any of the parents felt.

When the narrator meets his future wife Yuzu, they are both seeing other people but the narrator feels a sort of very primal attraction to the woman. Yuzu, you see, reminds him very much of his sister before her untimely death. It was nothing physical that had a resemblance but the essence of Yuzu. Yuzu had a face that was perpetually positive in nature. She radiated a kind of optimism that the narrator wanted to encapsulate himself with. Psychologically speaking, its not like the narrator was attracted to the idea of his sister or the physicality. This is far removed from that. he predominantly wanted to bring back to life the idea of the existence that represented his sister or even his lost family dynamics. It was a world that was full of joy and happiness and what got destroyed with Komichi’s death.

When his wife leaves him without any coherent reason, i guess that is one of the biggest reasons he was left totally emotionally numb. It was as if the world had taken away something most valuable to him without any rhyme or reason. One cannot discredit the poetic resemblance in both these occurences.

Later in the book when the narrator is introduced to Mariye, it wasn’t like she reminded him of his sister or his wife. It was probably an innocence that was still an innocence needing protection or preservation. When Mariye disappears, no one has any idea where she went. Menshiki does not know that Mariye was in his house but by the closet incident we know that his latent personality was aware of the whole thing. The narrator’s decision to accept the Commendatore’s cryptic proposition in my opinion was based on his desire to somehow “save a little girl” – Maybe he saw it as an opportunity to save his sister in essence. You know?

“What I can do for my friends,” the Commendatore said, “is to send you to a place wherein my friends encounter yourself. But that is not as easy as it may sound. It will involve considerable sacrifice, and an excruciating ordeal. More specifically, the sacrifice will be made by the idea while the ordeal will be endured by my friends. Do I have your approval?”

“So what is it exactly that I have to do?”

“It is simple,” the Commendatore said. “My friends must slay me.”

I found it really curious that all of this had to happen in front of Tomohiko Amada as he lay dying in his retreat home. Amada is not lucid and barely remembers anything at all but we are told that he is expending considerable energy for his last moments because he does sense that something extremely significant is about to take place. The idea itself orchestrated it like that. Though it might be a stretch to call it orchestration since in the commendatore’s own words, ideas have limited power. It could just be the string of destiny that was pulling certain characters to intersect their plotlines on a singular location.

Why exactly did it have to be connected? Maybe the reason is that when certain events unfold they have no choice but to interlink with each other so that it evolves into a labyrinth. One that must be solved together.

The idea of slaying the Commendatore represents a powerful symbolism. Amada must witness it in front of his eyes so that he can resolve the deep trauma and resentment that he has been harboring in his soul for decades. Its like, the idea manifested itself in the form of Commendatore for exactly that purpose. Amada had probably obsessed about this idea of slaying the Commendatore to a point that it simply had no other choice but to obtain corporeal form. They say powerful intentions and energies have a tendency of materializing into the physical realm so that they can be resolved. Its like there is a mystical threshold that is crossed by the idea if it just cannot be contained in the soul of the one harboring it.

This is why the ringing of the monk bell is so relevant here. Murakami painted this picture in the backdrop of ancient buddhist practices where monks would voluntarily descend into a nether region, forsaking the world to immerse themselves in meditation until they achieve enlightenment. In a way, the bell ringing incessently until the narrator had no choice but to heed its call was a sort of placeholder for our psyche calling out to us to resolve something important. The monk story is interesting in this context because there were clearly a lot of unresolved psychological disturbances in the narrators head related to the death of his sister and being abandoned by his wife.

The idea somehow knew that the person who could finally resolve Amada’s trauma was the narrator. Its poetic because the narrator was a painter like Amada and had this desire to resolve something deeply meaningful. So it was everything falling into an ordained order.

One could say that maybe this is why healing cannot occur in isolation. We are always dependent on others and others are always dependent on us.

Lets try to understand now why Amada decided to paint the eggplant figure into the painting. He had nothing to do with the Don Giovanni story. He wasn’t anything that represented Amada’s immediate surroundings. We could perhaps say that it could be the bystanders or even better, the cosmic observance that appears from a hidden portal to witness but not directly intervene. Whats interesting here is that in the painting, the scene is not of what actually happened; where the young man and Donna Anna were the ones being sacrificed. It was the other way around. A wish fulfilment of sorts. The cosmic observance is maybe a witness to what should have happened.

The descent itself was pretty straightforward. The narrator sacrifices the idea and gains access to the underworld. The underworld of course is shapeless and formless. I found Murakami’s idea of the underworld fascinating. Up to this point, I had read a lot of Carl Jung. Especially relevant to the context of this phenomena is his work “The Red Book – Liber Novus“.

The “underworld” or “hell” mentioned in relation to Liber Novus refers to the descent into Jung’s own unconscious mind, a process of confronting and integrating the shadow self, which Jung viewed as a necessary step in the individuation process.

Jung believed that the unconscious holds powerful archetypes and images that shape our personalities.

Individuation is the process of becoming a fully realized individual, integrating the conscious and unconscious aspects of the self.

The Shadow is the unconscious aspect of the self that contains repressed or unacceptable thoughts, feelings, and impulses

Now that we understand the basic premise of what the descent meant atleast in Jungian terms, lets explore the visual landscape and themes touched upon in Murakami’s work.

Eternity is a very long time

“But I don’t know which path to take. Or which direction to go.”

“Such things are inconsequential here,” came the rumble from the milky void. “You have drunk from the river, have you not? Now each of your actions will generate an equivalent response, in accordance with the principles of connectivity. Such is the place you have come to.”

My interpretation to this conversation between the narrator and the faceless man is that the concept of “flow” or “Tao” is being touched upon here. This concept holds a lot of reverence in Taoist philosophy. Asians in China, Japan, Korea, Tibet, Nepal all have this central idea that the flow of self and the realm must not be disturbed. If you live your life in constant flow like a river, your life will become a harmonious set of occurences. If the flow or Chi is blocked however, you will find many disruptions and obstacles in your path. This concept is also central to the practice of Feng Shui which emphasizes the importance of flow in one’s living space. Indian practice of Vaastu Shastra also discusses the importance of a harmonious existence. So in essence, when the narrator accepted his psychological disturbance and ventured into the underworld to resolve and recover innocence from its depths, he essentially entered into the flow state of the Universe. He bowed to the supernatural occcurences in life as if to admit that there are many things in life that are unexplainable and must be followed instead of resisted. If one is to accept the natural course by confronting one’s shadow and seek resolution through certain rituals, the paths will form themselves and appear to the observer.

Now each of your actions will generate an equivalent response, in accordance with the principles of connectivity.

As the narrator walks on, the landscape changes and morphes from one thing to another and eventually he enters a dense forest with no light. The significance of the forest can be interpreted as being willingly entrenched in nature so as to understand one’s own. He then finds the cave. Caves have symbolically been connected to the un-conscious realm in various cultures, mythology, literature, psychology and religious thought. They represent something dark, hidden and deeply mysterious. A realm of shadow, transformation and hidden truth.

Caves, by their very nature, are enclosed, subterranean, and separated from the light of the sun. They require descent – one must go inward and downward, often into darkness, to reach them. This descent mirros the psychological journey inward, away from the ego’s control and into the domain of repressed memories, instincts, and archetypal forces.

For Jung, the unconscious was not simply a repository of personal memory but also the source of archetypes: universal symbols and patterns inherited across generations. In this framework, a cave can be seen as the womb of the Great Mother archetype – a place of origin, gestations, and psychological rebirth.

The cave is also an important motif here because of the unnamed narrators visit to the caves in his childhood with his sister. As you recall, Komichi insists on entering an unknown and unexplored fissure in the caves and the narrator waits for her outside. After what seemed like eternity, Komi returned with very abstract descriptions of her experience. It kinda makes me think of the scene in the movie Descent where the mother sits hallucinating her dead daughter with a birthday cake between them. All type of tricks can be played by the mind in a soundless, visionless void. More importantly, the narrator later felt like that his sister actually died in that cave and the year she spends with her family afterwards was just borrowed time. So you can understand how emotionally charged this whole cave experience in the underworld must be for the narrator.

The ordeal the Commendatore mentioned was for the narrator to travel through an increasingly tightening tunnel in order to get out from that world back to reality. He had always been claustrophobic ever since that cave experience with his sister. It was obviously meant to help him resolve and dissipate that trauma from his system. The whole experience was of course painful and seemingly impossible, as all trauma resolutions are but he makes it out. And finds himself in the original pit in the woods from where Menshiki who just seems to know where the narrator must be rescues him.

In the Aftermath, the narrator gets the whole story from Mariye of how she was in Menshiki’s house the entire time and what transpired there. He reconciles with his wife and moves back with her on the mainland. Mariye eventually comes to terms with living alongside her aunt and Menshiki.

The last piece of the puzzle is the way the narrators wife gets impregnated by the narrator through a dream sequence. In the narrators mind, he wanted what transpired to occur so badly that he opened up some sort of portal through which he reached out to his wife and got her pregnant. I honestly don’t know what to make of it but i do have some thoughts about it. I’ll circle back to the idea that sometimes certain feelings are so strong in human souls that they have no other choice but to manifest in some form or other. In the real world, it might not look like someone impregnating their estranged wife through a portal but through certain other means. Unexplainable occurences, thoughts and feelings in someones head. Seemingly non-sensical coincidences. Words and intentions truly hold immeasurable power which is why we must exercise caution when borrowing it.

All in all, i thoroughly enjoyed the book. It kept me hooked the entire time and left me with so much to reflect on. I look forward to your thoughts and theories on the subject.