Killing Commendatore, in Five Parts
An original condensed retelling of Haruki Murakami's novel
Part 1: A Painter Alone in the Mountains
An unnamed thirty-six-year-old portrait painter in Tokyo is abandoned by his wife, Yuzu, with little explanation, sending him into a quiet personal collapse. Seeking solitude, he moves into the remote mountain home of his art-school friend's father, Tomohiko Amada, a once-celebrated painter now living out his final days in a care facility, suffering from severe dementia.
Living alone in Amada's isolated house, the narrator struggles with a creative block of his own, having grown disillusioned with the commercial portrait work that's paid his bills for years. To make ends meet, he reluctantly agrees to take on a lucrative private portrait commission from Wataru Menshiki, a wealthy, immaculately groomed, and quietly mysterious neighbor living across the valley.
Exploring the attic one day, the narrator discovers a hidden, previously unknown painting by Amada himself, carefully wrapped and tucked away out of sight. The painting, titled Killing Commendatore, depicts a violent scene from Mozart's opera Don Giovanni, rendered in traditional Japanese style but startlingly graphic, showing a nobleman being run through with a sword as horrified onlookers watch.
Part 2: The Idea Takes Form
Soon after uncovering the painting, the narrator begins hearing a strange, unexplained bell ringing at night, seemingly coming from somewhere in the forest behind the house. Investigating with Menshiki's help, they discover a mysterious stone pit hidden beneath a small shrine near the property, sealed for who knows how long.
Once the pit is opened, a two-foot-tall figure calling himself the Commendatore appears, identical to the murdered nobleman in Amada's painting, claiming to be the physical manifestation of an "Idea," a concept given form because the painting itself was finally uncovered and observed. Strange as it sounds, the narrator finds himself simply accepting the Commendatore's presence, since only he, and not Menshiki, seems able to actually see or hear the strange being.
Through fragments the Commendatore is willing to share, the narrator gradually learns the true history behind Amada's disturbing painting: as a young man studying in Vienna, Amada was involved in a failed assassination plot against a high-ranking Nazi official, a plot that led directly to his lover's execution and his own quiet, shamed expulsion back to Japan. The painting, the narrator realizes, imagines a different version of history entirely, one where that assassination attempt actually succeeded.
Part 3: A Neighbor's Secret
Menshiki, continuing his portrait sittings, eventually reveals a deeply personal motive behind his interest in the narrator and the surrounding neighborhood: he believes a thirteen-year-old girl living nearby, Mariye Akikawa, may be his own biological daughter from a past relationship, though he's never confirmed this and she has no idea of his suspicion.
Menshiki asks the narrator, who also happens to be tutoring Mariye in painting, to help him find quiet, natural ways to be near her, hoping to observe and perhaps eventually connect with the daughter he's never been able to openly claim. The arrangement remains strictly platonic throughout, driven entirely by Menshiki's complicated longing for a family connection he's never allowed himself.
As the narrator paints portraits of both Menshiki and, eventually, Mariye herself, his own creative block finally begins to lift, and he starts developing a bolder, more personal painting style entirely distinct from the commercial portrait work he'd grown to resent, discovering along the way that genuinely capturing a subject's essence requires far more than technical skill alone.
Part 4: Into the Land of Metaphor
The story takes a darker turn when Mariye suddenly goes missing, throwing both Menshiki and the narrator into frightened, desperate searching. The Commendatore informs the narrator that finding her will require a far stranger kind of journey: a deliberate descent into what he calls the Land of Metaphor, a metaphysical realm the narrator can only reach by literally reenacting the violent scene from Amada's painting.
Following the Commendatore's own insistence, the narrator kills the tiny figure with a kitchen knife, a ritual sacrifice the Commendatore himself requests and seems to require in order to open the necessary passage. The act sends the narrator tumbling into a surreal underground realm, where he encounters a silent, faceless ferryman-like guide and another Idea taking the form of a woman called Donna Anna, who helps orient him within this shifting, symbolic landscape.
Donna Anna explains that the river running through this metaphysical space "flows along the interstice between presence and absence," a description that captures the entire realm's function in the novel: a liminal space of pure metaphor and possibility that the narrator must navigate carefully, since there's a real risk he might not find his way back out again.
Part 5: Coming Back Changed
The narrator successfully navigates his way back out of the Land of Metaphor, and shortly afterward, Mariye is found safe, having been hiding on her own for reasons the novel leaves partly ambiguous rather than fully explained, consistent with its broader resistance to tidy, complete resolutions.
In the story's aftermath, the narrator reconciles with his estranged wife Yuzu, who is now pregnant with a child the narrator has reason to suspect may not be biologically his own. Rather than treating this as a crisis, he makes a quiet, deliberate choice to accept and love the child regardless, framing fatherhood as an act of will and care rather than strict biology.
Amada's original painting, Killing Commendatore, is later destroyed in a fire, and the narrator and Mariye ultimately seal away his own related, unfinished painting inspired by the entire ordeal, hiding it back in the attic much as the original was once hidden from the world. The novel closes on a note of quiet, hard-won stability, the narrator's confrontation with the metaphysical Idea beneath his own art having ultimately reconnected him with the ordinary, imperfect human relationships he'd lost touch with at the story's start.
This piece is an original condensed adaptation summarizing the plot and characters of Haruki Murakami's Killing Commendatore, written for general audiences and not a reproduction of the original text.
Still Struggling to Understand the Reverence for Killing Commendatore? Use This Cheat Sheet
A 700-page Murakami epic that got banned in Hong Kong and attacked by Japanese nationalists, for two completely different reasons. Here's what you need to know.
Q: What's it actually about, in one sentence?
A recently divorced portrait painter moves into a famous artist's isolated mountain home, discovers a hidden, disturbing painting in the attic, and finds himself drawn into a surreal metaphysical mystery involving a tiny manifestation of an "Idea," a wealthy neighbor's secret daughter, and a journey into a symbolic realm called the Land of Metaphor.
Q: Was this a hit when it came out, or did it flop?
Big commercial hit, immediately. Published in Japan in February 2017 across two volumes with an initial print run of 1.3 million copies, it became an instant bestseller, marking Murakami's first multi-volume novel in seven years since 1Q84. The English translation followed in 2018 to broadly positive, if occasionally mixed, reviews from major outlets.
Q: So why does everyone still bring this book up today?
Because of a genuinely rare double controversy: Japanese right-wing nationalists attacked Murakami for acknowledging the 1937 Nanjing Massacre within the story, accusing him of pandering for a Nobel Prize, while separately, Hong Kong's own censorship tribunal classified the book as "indecent," temporarily banning it from the city's biggest book fair and restricting library access, a ban some observers linked instead to Murakami's past public support for Hong Kong's pro-democracy protesters.
Q: What's the one line people quote from this?
Guiding the narrator through the novel's strangest passage, the character Donna Anna explains that the underground river he must cross "flows along the interstice between presence and absence," a line that captures the entire novel's fascination with liminal, in-between states, neither fully real nor fully imagined.
Q: Is this really just a supernatural mystery, or is there a deeper meaning?
Beneath its strange plot mechanics, the novel is fundamentally about art and trauma: Tomohiko Amada's hidden painting reimagines a real historical failure, a botched assassination attempt against a Nazi official, as a version where the plot succeeds, suggesting art's power to process and reshape unbearable personal history. The narrator's own parallel journey, literally killing a symbolic figure to access deeper metaphorical truth, mirrors the idea that real creative breakthrough sometimes requires confronting something genuinely painful rather than staying safely on the surface.
Q: Why do people find this one difficult, despite being a bestseller?
At roughly 700 pages, it's a genuinely demanding commitment, and several reviewers have specifically noted it works best for readers already familiar with Murakami's recurring tropes and symbolism rather than as a first introduction to his writing. The metaphysical "Idea" and "Metaphor" concepts are also left deliberately vague and unresolved rather than clearly explained, a hallmark of Murakami's style that some readers find enchanting and others find frustratingly evasive.
Q: What's a high-value, low-effort trivia fact I can drop about this?
Murakami has used this exact device before — a formless "Idea" taking on a specific physical shape — in his earlier novel Kafka on the Shore, where the same concept manifested as the fried-chicken mascot Colonel Sanders, meaning the Commendatore isn't a one-off invention but part of a recurring Murakami technique across different books.
Q: What context actually unlocks the rest of this book?
Know that Murakami has openly described the novel as a loving homage to The Great Gatsby, and the parallel is easy to spot once you know to look: Menshiki, the wealthy, mysterious, immaculately dressed neighbor with a hidden personal longing, functions as a clear echo of Jay Gatsby, right down to his carefully engineered "chance" encounters with someone he can't approach directly.
Q: Got a second quote I can use — something from criticism rather than the book?
The Boston Globe's review praised Murakami as "a wiz at melding the mundane with the surreal," a tidy, quotable summary of exactly the skill that lets a novel about an attic painting and a mysterious bell escalate into full metaphysical strangeness without ever feeling entirely unmoored from ordinary life.
Q: Cheat sheet vs. actually experiencing it — what's the honest verdict?
Worth reading if you're already a Murakami fan or have time for a genuinely long, slow-building novel, though it's fair to know upfront that this isn't considered the best entry point into his work by most longtime readers. Its deliberate ambiguity and unhurried pacing are central to the intended reading experience, an atmosphere that a plot summary can only describe rather than actually recreate.
This piece paraphrases and contextualizes publicly documented history and criticism about Killing Commendatore; direct quotations are limited to one line from the novel itself and one line from a Boston Globe review.