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Note | Who Is Tomohiko Amada ?

Tomohiko Amada is an imaginary Japanese painter of traditional Japanese painting who appears on Haruki Murakami’s long novel Killing Commendatore . (§ 3, 4, 5, 25, 26, 28, 29, 36, 37, 40, 41, 48, 49, 51) So he doesn’t exist in reality. He is not a real person.

His model might be a Japanese art painter, Sanko Inoue (1899 – 1981).

Tomohiko Amada was born in Aso, Kumamoto. His family was a great landowner and quite affluent. He graduated from the Tokyo Fine Arts School (later Tokyo University of of the Arts), then he studied abroad Western painting in Vienna from the end of 1936 to the beginning of 1939. During the time, Austria was annexed by Nazi Germany, and the Anschluss took place in March 1938. He must be witness of historical events at the era. (§ 3, 4) He was caught in a scandal of aborted assassination in Vienna, was concerned with his lover, a member of a resistance group. Then he was sent back to Japan by the Japanese embassy in Berlin. (§ 25)

He returned to Japan in February 1939. After he came back to Japan completely switched his style from Western to traditional Japanese. He maintained silence for over six years. After the second world war and the Pacific War had ended, he debuted again and he succeed in the Japanese style painting as an up-and-coming painter. (§ 3, 4)

His former style of painting was modernist abstract painting was heavily influenced by Cubism. His Western style paintings were excellent but something were missing. (§ 3, 4)

His Japanese paintings had something unique only he could express. Motifs of his paintings were realistic scenery and flower, the same as most Japanese style painters. Then he begun to paint scenes of ancient Japan as the Asuka period especially and the Heian and Kamakura periods. (§ 3, 4)

He was a fan of classical music and opera, and went to the opera house at Vienna frequently. He heard Richard Strauss conduct one of symphonies by Beethoven with the Vienna Philharmonic. So he had a record collection of opera and chamber music, and always painted Japanese art while listening classical music. (§ 3, 4, 48)

Killing Commendatore is a Japanese traditional style painting work by Tomohiko Amada. The narrator found the tableau from the attic of Amada’s house. The painting represents a scene of Asuka period and was the only painting by Amada represents violent scene. On the painting, a young man thrusts an old man by a sward, and his blood is pouring from his chest. An elegant lady, a young man and a mysterious man in a hole watch the fight while they are astonished. And the painting might be inspired by Mozart’s Don Giovanni and its adoption, besides it describes the incident of which Amada was caught in Vienna. (§ 5, 26)

The present time of the novel, he was ninety-two years old, and in a nursing home in Izu because of his dementia. (§ 3, 4, 49, 51)

When Amada was about to pass away, his spirit or ghost visited his studio where the narrator used, sat on a stool and gazed at his painting Killing Commendatore. (§ 40, 41)

His son, Masahiko Amada was a classmate of an art collage and the only intimate friend of the narrator. He had studied oil painting too, but he was not artist type, and he became graphic designer in Tokyo. Masahiko lent his father’s mountaintop house in Odawara to the narrator. (§ 8)

Details of the Book

Killing Commendatore
Haruki Murakami
Vintage Publishing, London, 03 October 2019
704 pages
ISBN: 9781784707330

Note | Keywords of Haruki Murakami

black long hair

Swinging black straight long hair is a frequently appeared thing in Murakami’s novels. It’s a symbol of women’s beauty, fascination, tenderness, delicacy and transience. And a woman has black long hair couldn’t be happy. (Hear the Wind Sing, Norwegian Wood, Colorless Tuskuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, First Person Singular)

car

Car is not only a viecle, but also is a cultural thing expresses the characteristics and the life style of a person who owns it. (Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore) Also car is a medium on which one experiences a landscape or a geography, and traces a story. (If Our Words Would Be Whiskey, Drive My Car)

Derek Hartfield

Derek Hartfield is an imaginary American writer who appears in Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Hear the Wind Sing. So he does’t exist in reality.

A man of the same age as Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and He was few writers which can use words as a weapon equal to them. Yet his his text is difficult to read, the story is random and the theme is immature. But he could never grasp exactly what it was he was fighting against, so his life and career were barren and miserable.

Hartfield’s writing is the ideal model which deconstructs the grand narrative and significance of the Japanese pure literature. The narrator learned by the style of Hartfield as writing is the act of verifying distances among things, so we need a measuring stick, not sensitivity.

foreign language

To acquire foreign languages in Murakami’s novels is to know a rule of a system and a rule as Wittgenstein's language game. he can learn easily many foreign languages, so he can obtain and dominate many language games such as love with women, the Japanese academic-oriented society, and he . (Norwegian Wood) Tengo Kawana and Tsukuru Tazaki acquired French and German in their university years. It may signifies they became grown-up and got the pass to communicate with others. (1Q84, Colorless Tuskuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage)

music

Murakami is an enthusiastic fan of jazz, classical music and rock. And Murakami ran jazz bars in Kokubunji and Sendagaya, Tokyo, because he wanted to listen jazz always. Music is an essential element, has important role and meaning in Murakami’s works. On Norwegian Wood, music is a practical treatment of mind and a thing of which one traces a story. On After Dark, many pop music and easy listening songs appeared, and they imply the ordinary and vulgar mood of contemporary Japanese city sceneries. (Novelist as a Profession, Norwegian Wood, After Dark)

talent, genius

Talent or genius in Murakami's works is a nature of which certain people own, to express or to perform seriously music, writing or art getting over an own limitation. It’s not a technique or knowledge got by learning. (Norwegian Wood, South of the Border, West of the Sun, Sputnik Sweetheart, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Killing Commendatore)

Tomohiko Amada

Tomohiko Amada is an imaginary Japanese painter of traditional Japanese painting who appears on Haruki Murakami’s long novel Killing Commendatore. His model might be a Japanese art painter, Sanko Inoue (1899 – 1981).

Tomohiko Amada was born in Aso, Kumamoto. He graduated from the Tokyo Fine Arts School (later Tokyo University of of the Arts), then he studied abroad Western painting in Vienna from the end of 1936 to the beginning of 1939. He was caught in a scandal of aborted assassination in Vienna, was concerned with his lover, a member of a resistance group. Then he was sent back to Japan by the Japanese embassy in Berlin.

He returned to Japan in February 1939. After the Pacific War had ended, he debuted again and he succeed in the Japanese style painting as an up-and-coming painter. (Killing Commendatore)

Note | Who is Derek Hartfield ?

Derek Hartfield is an imaginary American writer who appears in Haruki Murakami’s debut novel Hear the Wind Sing . (Chapters 1, 32 and 40, Afterword) So he isn’t a real person. And he doesn’t exist in reality.

The character model of him might be Kurt Vonnegut or Robert E. Howard.

Derek Hartfield was born in 1909, a small town, Ohio. After graduated a high school, he had been working at the post office in his hometown for a while, then he became a writer.

He was an unfortunate writer. He sold his fifth short novel to Weird Tales for twenty dollars in 1930. The next year, he wrote and wrote 70,000 words per month, in the following year, it gained 100,000 words, it was 150,000 words in the year before he passed away. There’s the legend that he might change and buy again a Remington typewriter every six months.

His writing career is only eight years and two months. Most of his works are adventure stories or horror stories. His biggest hit series is Waldo, boy adventure of a mixture of both of them. Other his works are What’s So Bad About Feeling Good? (1936), the semi-autobiographical novel One and a Half Times Around the Rainbow (1937) a sci-fi short story The Martian Wells and so on.

On a clear Sunday morning, in June 1938, the year his mother had passed away, he jumped from the Empire State Building holding a portrait of Hitler and put up an umbrella.

When the summer vacation of the third grade of junior high, the narrator was given a book of Derek Hartfield by his uncle. And the narrator bought some paperbacks by Hartfield which a foreign crewman sold, each of them was priced 50 Japanese yen, at a second-hand book store in Kobe, when he was a high school student.

Descriptions about Hartfield represented Murakami’s philosophy of writing and policy of life. On Novelist as a Profession, Murakami said that when he wrote Hear the Wind Sing, he thought “I must write from I have nothing to write”. (p. 134)

A work of Hartfield was titled What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, which means Murakami’s antipathy to the Japanese artistic and authoritarian literary scene. He thought was “It’s fine it’s only feeling fun to write for me.” (p. 270)

Hartfield’s writing is the ideal model which deconstructs the grand narrative and significance of the Japanese pure literature. The narrator learned by the style of. Hartfield, as writing is the act of verifying distances among things, we need a measuring stick, not sensitivity.

Only in the Japanese edition, there’s the afterword, “Hartfield, again… (as an afterword)” as a fake episode. The content is the narrator or Murakami himself visited a small and shabby graveyard of Derek Hartfield. Including the effect of the afterword, Japanese readers had been believed Hartfield was a real person. When the novel was published, the librarians were confused by inquiries from the readers who believed he really existed.