Killing Commendatore

Product Description

The ambitious major new novel from this internationally celebrated writer, on the scale of his bestselling 1Q84

The painter's wife has left him for a younger man. Taking some time away from Tokyo, he starts looking after the empty house of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. Not long after he moves in, a scraping sound in the attic leads him to find a carefully wrapped canvas, labelled 'Killing Commendatore'. This unusual painting leads him to delve into Amada's life story and those of his neighbours. It also brings him into contact with a strange parallel universe, from which the Commendatore himself emerges. When his neighbour's daughter vanishes, the painter must embark on a quest that leads him back to a tragedy in his own past.

A profound engagement with art and its creation, Killing Commendatore asks whether confronting the past can ever bring comfort, or just more pain? Ambitious, haunting, and multi-layered, it is reminiscent of Murakami's masterpiece The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and takes his narrative art in new and exciting directions.The ambitious major new novel from this internationally celebrated writer, on the scale of his bestselling 1Q84

The painter's wife has left him for a younger man. Taking some time away from Tokyo, he starts looking after the empty house of a famous artist, Tomohiko Amada. Not long after he moves in, a scraping sound in the attic leads him to find a carefully wrapped canvas, labelled 'Killing Commendatore'. This unusual painting leads him to delve into Amada's life story and those of his neighbours. It also brings him into contact with a strange parallel universe, from which the Commendatore himself emerges. When his neighbour's daughter vanishes, the painter must embark on a quest that leads him back to a tragedy in his own past.

A profound engagement with art and its creation, Killing Commendatore asks whether confronting the past can ever bring comfort, or just more pain? Ambitious, haunting, and multi-layered, it is reminiscent of Murakami's masterpiece The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, and takes his narrative art in new and exciting directions.
In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers' award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami's unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami's place as one of the world's most acclaimed and well-loved writers.