Subtle Bodies and Astral Sex in Killing Commendatore

 

Notes from a Reading Life

"An image of a color I should add came to me. The idea sprang up suddenly, all on its own. The color was like that of a tree with its green leaves dully dyed by rain. I mixed several colors together and created what I wanted on my palette..I was simply following ideas that sprang up naturally inside me, with no plan or goal. Like a child, not watching his step, chasing some unusual butterfly fluttering across a field."

This is how Haruki Murakami captures the moment a burned-out artist gets in the zone in his novel Killing Commendatore. While the book title might suggest a mob movie, it is the name of a painting inspired by a figure in Mozart's "Don Giovanni".

Amomg its many gifts and surprises Killing Commendatore gives us a wildly interesting perspective on the nature and travels of subtle energy bodies. It also dramatizes processes of materialization by which entities from realms beyond human perception can take up residence in  forms created by humans.

I thrilled to this observation by Menshiki the son of a great Japanese artist: "There's a point in everybody's life where they need a major transformation. And when that time comes you have to grab it by the tail. Grab it hard and never let it go. There are some people who are able to, and others who can't."

The action of the novel gets under way when a thirty-something commercial portrait artist leaves a broken marriage and an uncreative life to live in borrowed space, the mountain house of a famous artist who is now in a nursing home with dementia. He discovers a previously unknown painting by the artist hidden in the attic and tightly wrapped. Inspired by Mozart’s Don Giovanni, it depicts the stabbing of The Commendatore with amazing vividness, adding a figure sticking his long head out of a hole to observe.

The discovery of the picture, and a little grey horned owl in the attic, triggers a strange series of events. A bell-like sound from the woods behind the house before 3 am every night leads to major excavation -organized by the mysterious rich man in a white palace on a peak across the valley – that opens a pit with slick, unclimbable walls nine feet deep.This leads the narrator to recall a classic horror story of a Buddhist monk who had himself buried alive, ringing a  bronze bell to indicate he was still there until he wasn’t (but something else now walked the earth in his semblance).There is an old bronze bell in the pit. Who or what was buried here and why were all those stones and boards placed to hold it captive?

The question is enlarged rather than answered when a two-foot high character, the spitting image of The Commendatore in the painting, starts appearing to the narrator.

Late in the novel there is an astonishing description of the protagonist having astral sex with his estranged wife, flying from his eyrie on a mountain to her bedroom in Tokyo. It’s so real that he worries that he raped her while she was asleep. Nine months later she has a baby for which there is no physical father in ordinary reality since she had stopped having sex with her boyfriend.