A Portrait of the Uncanny in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore

Haruki Murakami’s novels are known for their varied worlds with characters moving between realistic and metaphysical realms. One might refer to them as “other worlds” within the genre of magical realism. Japanese critics use the term, achiragawa, meaning “over there.” Christopher Weinberger calls Murakami’s worlds a “fractal realism” in which characters cross “ontological planes” while maintaining an “originary reality.” Not unlike many of Haruki Murakami’s plot structures, Killing Commendatore uses supernatural spaces to reveal the processes of a character’s mind, a kind of self-discovery where the external architectural structure correlates to the human character’s (sometimes multiple characters’) psyche.