Post-classical, Neoklassik, Indie Classical, Minimal Music, Ambient, Piano Solo, Piano Trio / Classical Music Recording: Erik Satie, Béla Bartók, Edvard Grieg, Enrique Granados, Charles Koechlin, Mel Bonis, Cécile Chaminade, Reynaldo Hahn, Charles Gounod, Jules Massenet, Gabriel Fauré, Gabriel Pierné, Félix Le Couppey, Leopold Mozart | Music Reviews of Nils Frahm, Akira Kosemura, Henning Schmiedt, Fabrizio Paterlini, George Winston & Ryuichi Sakamoto | Paul Auster, Haruki Murakami & Jean-Philippe Toussaint Studies | Poetry Translations: Paul Éluard, Anna de Noailles, Rupert Brooke
After 6 years interval (“Killing Commendatore”, February 2017), Haruki Murakami’s new long novel will publish on 13 April 2023 (JPY 2970) from Shinchosha (New Wave Company).
A long novel book of the 1200 manuscripts.
The same time, the eBook edition will release for the first time of his career.
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)
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)
