However strange something purports to be, it's not usually that unusual. The world by now being more many and various than ever it was, being odd and original is ever harder. I'm not even convinced that it is the weirdness that Murakami's worldwide 'cult' following like about him so much. This far along his career, he fits entirely into established traditions, firstly as a 'magic realist' in the same genre as Angela Carter and Salman Rushdie.If Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki largely dispensed with parallel realities, we are back here with characters who have sprung from a painting, other-worldliness and unlikeliness, back in a world where such things as those in A Wild Sheep Chase are possible.
Our first person narrator is a painter, who makes a living from portrait painting. In order to make him a loner but unthreatening, he leaves his wife and has a casual girlfriend and, being a Murakami character, tells us more than is necessary about the relationship on the safe side of soft porn. Killing Commendatore is a painting he finds in the attic of a house he uses while its owner, the artist, Tomohiko Amada, is dying in a home. It is a scene from Don Giovanni and the commendatore in it comes alive as a 2 ft. tall 'idea' that not everybody can see.
Menshiki lives on the opposite side of the mountain valley. He is like a Jay Gatsby, of immaculate taste, great wealth but little apparent background. He will pay anything to have his portrait painted and then wants a portrait of the young girl, Mariye, who he thinks might be his daughter.
We are lured into a captivating adventure by a mysterious bell that can be heard in the distance in the small hours of the night. I thought the owl found in the attic was going to speak and expected it to do so by page 250 but it doesn't, it's not so much an owl as a red herring.
So, if we have 'magic realism', Gatsby, a painting that has a life of its own like Dorian Gray, adventures in an underworld akin to Hades and the River Styx, a 'lost girl' novel for a few chapters when Mariye goes missing, and tension lifted from Hitchcock films when she is trapped in Menshiki's house, the novel can soon be seen as being made up of themes from elsewhere, with Murakami making his luxcurious, slow progress to 681 easy-going pages by adding further threads to his post-modern tapestry.
Like Hamlet, there is a doubling of the Menshiki-Mariye fathership question when our narrator might possibly be the father of a child his ex-wife is expecting, a child somehow inevitably conceived in a dream.
In its studiedly postmodern way, the novel hints at ways it might be interpreted but one would only do so at one's peril. As soon as a character shows up, their clothing and demeanour are described in meticulous detail, mainly Menshiki, and his sleek Jaguar car, too, which are signifiers of the good taste that immensde wealth can buy, to put alongside the choice collection of opera on vinyl in Amada's house. It all suggests that Murakami, here and elsewhere, is really about semiotics and style over substance but whether that is ironic or simply product placement to keep his readers happy is hard to say.
As with contemporary art, or when, as cricketers, we used to sometimes walk out to have a look at the wicket before a match, it is wise not to offer too much of an opinion, but just look, nod and appear as if one appreciates a range of possibilities, none of which you are prepared to commit to.
There's much to be said for not having definitive interpretations in the way that exam answers used to want us to provide. The best exam answers these days presumably don't offer any judgement on whether Hamlet was mad, not mad, or pretending to be. We surely tend to float around a bit more these days and enjoy the unsecured detachment, like a country in freefall not knowing where it might align itself in only a few weeks' time.
Murakami is still an enormously enjoyable read, sociable and likeable in his translator's easy-going version of what must be easy-going Japanese, laced very sparingly with 'poetic' imagery when he remembers to put some in. I am a loyal adherent and look for the next title as soon as the latest is finished with the same misdirected obsession that led me to read Solzhenitsyn as a teenager when, really, I could have been reading Tolstoy, Dickens, Fielding, Balzac and maybe even Jane Austen. I keep the faith and wouldn't want to miss anything although the lovely but lightweight bookcase that currently houses the not quite complete works of Murakami might thank me one day if it were given over to slim volumes of poetry and these weighty hardbacks allocated elsewhere.
Eventually, with anybody, if they go on long enough, one senses some technique at work and I might have glimpsed a bit of a Murakami formula in this book. Never mind, all that anyone can do is stop before it reveals itself and pass up royalties one might have had or stick at it and cash in, like an ageing football star going to play in China in their mid-thirties.
This is a very enjoyable book but if you haven't read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, IQ84 or South of the Border, West of the Sun (which is where I started), I'd read them first.