What's more, the tropes that served as delightful flavoring in his earlier works begin to feel practically meme-like in their appearances, almost like mechanical inclusions by the author. Yet over the course of 700 pages, you come to deeply feel Killing Commendatore's length passages of exposition are redundant, and the excruciatingly slow build to action makes you wonder about Murakami's strategy of not having ' any plan at all' when he begins a new book.

Modeled very roughly after The Great Gatsby, the novel follows an unnamed portrait painter during the nine months he is living in the mountains while separated from his wife. Killing Commendatore is at least the best of Murakami's most recent novels - it is coherent and not outwardly offensive - although it still succumbs to the author's worst tendencies. Where was the depth of Wind-Up Bird? Or the concision of A Wild Sheep Chase? were they even any good? While Killing Commendatore's predecessors, 1Q84 (published in English in 2011) and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (published in English in 2014), received generally positive reviews in the U.S., both were deeply flawed books: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a vague probing of the fallout of a false rape allegation, more interested in the impact on the male victim than the motivations of his female friend, and 1Q84 is an unwieldy door-stopper in desperate need of an editor. It is a formula that has worked well for him for decades although after finishing Killing Commendatore this weekend, I couldn't help but look back at Murakami's last three novels and wonder. More than being known for, say, his prose style or his richly plotted narratives, Murakami is beloved for the genre he has created, his own particular take on magical realism, recognizable by tropes like pasta, cats, an oppressive sense of loneliness, and secret worlds that coexist in or beside our own. In his native Japan, Killing Commendatore got an eye-popping first-run of 1.3 million copies last year. He is the only author in translation who can pack midnight release parties in the United States.

A perennial favorite for the Nobel Prize in Literature, Murakami is one of the most beloved writers in the world, with his work published in more than 50 languages.

Murakami 1q84