When I think about ranking Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore against Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World, it hardly seems a fair fight.

Ishiguro’s novel has been a fundamental link in his Nobel Prize-winning chain for exactly four decades this April. It won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. It was made into a Ken Watanabe movie. It was the Japanese John the Baptist to the English Jesus Christ of The Remains of the Day, the book that made Ishiguro the most instantly recognizable Japanese British novelist of all time. Ono the Painter set the template for Stevens the Butler, from their ingratiating civility to their trust-canceling habit of disowning the account they have just reported. It has been compressed to perfection, hardly a word feels excessive or uninvolved in the book’s purposeful momentum.

Murakami’s novel is so Not That, it almost seems the opposite. It has been on shelves for less than a decade, and it already feels dated in its Updikean bad boy sexual energy. The most coveted trophy it has acquired is the Bad Sex in Fiction Award. (No, I’m not kidding.) Critics tend to regard it as a turgid, uneven late-career mediocrity that fails to live up to its promise. It is not John the Baptist to anything. Rather than feeling meticulously compressed, its 733 pages come across as inflated to the precipice of a needle pop.

Reading the book, however, I began to suspect that a lot of that is unfair. It was more inventive than I’d given it credit for. The 733 pages mostly fly by pleasantly if not obsessively. It isn’t the kind of prestige read that Floating World is, but it has ambition, charm, and thematic heft.

Still, I tended to think of Killing Commendatore as disqualified from serious contention with Ishiguro’s mini-masterpiece based on two persistently nagging impressions:

  • It is a shameless retread of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.
  • Its word selection is unusually vapid even for Murakami.

Shameless Retread

Is it? Is it, though?

Yes, both Wind-up and Commendatore are about a Murakami Man who refuses to accept his wife’s demand for a divorce.

Yes, both books juxtapose Murakami Man’s divorce angst with World War II tragedy.

Yes, both books explore latent male anger.

But the core idea of Commendatore, the Art-through-Process theme described in the canonical essay, is completely absent from Wind-Up and represents authentic insight on Murakami’s part.

Moreover, An Artist of the Floating World also deliberately revisits story elements from a prior work. I haven’t read A Pale View of Hills, but I understand that Ono and his story are a conscious reworking of its teacher subplot. Perhaps Killing Commendatore is less lazy retread than an attempt to return to a story he was still processing.

Vapid Word Choice

Murakami has never been known for sparkling verse. But in Killing Commendatore, his penchant for inexpressive prose seems to bottom to an insipid new low. Take the following passages as an example:

“Mariye’s aunt had a very tranquil, calm way of speaking. She had lovely features. Not the kind of beautiful woman that would turn heads, but neat, regular features. A natural, subdued smile graced her lips, like the pale moon at dawn.”

This narrator is supposed to be a portrait artist with a knack for capturing his subject’s authentic, singular soul using a probing eye for detail. But his description of Mariye’s aunt is not a Rembrandt; it is a Dick and Jane cartoon. Also, I wonder if anyone has ever written that closing simile before. “Pale moon at dawn” … Oh, wait, yes they have.

“I enjoyed listening to the music of Bach, Schubert, Brahms, Schumann, and Beethoven. Not forgetting Mozart, of course. Their music was deep, amazing, and gorgeous.”

You don’t say! Was it also good, awesome, and cool?

I wondered at first if Philip Gabriel was a weak new translator. After all, regular Murakami collaborator Jay Rubin could write the following translation from After Dark, so would he have been constitutionally capable of such bathetic language?

“To the rhythm of its pulsing, all parts of the body flicker and flare up and squirm. Midnight is approaching, and while the peak of activity has passed, the basal metabolism that maintains life continues undiminished, producing the basso continuo of the city’s moan, a monotonous sound that neither rises nor falls but is pregnant with foreboding.”

But, no, Gabriel was the translator of my favorite Murakami novel, Kafka on the Shore, and he was responsible for this:

“If you play Schubert’s sonatas, especially this one straight through, it’s not art. Like Schumann pointed out, it’s too long and too pastoral, and technically too simplistic. Play it through the way it is and it’s flat and tasteless, some dusty antique. Which is why every pianist who attempts it adds something of his own, something extra. Like this—hear how he articulates it there? Adding rubato. Adjusting the pace, modulation, whatever.”

But the strange thing is that Ishiguro, a native English speaker, has been saddled with the same diagnosis of “flat prose.” This is from James Wood in The New Yorker:

“Kazuo Ishiguro writes a prose of provoking equilibrium—sea-level flat, with unseen fathoms below. He avoids ornament or surplus, and seems to welcome cliché, platitude, episodes as bland as milk, an atmosphere of oddly vacated calm whose mild persistence comes to seem teasingly or menacingly unreal. … He does need the pressure of form, a narrative shape that forces his bland fictional representations to muster their significance. … [In these forms,] blandness emerges as a traumatized truce, a colorless pact that holds the personal and historical present together at the cost of a sinful amnesia. … “The Buried Giant” has far too much dialogue like this, more Monty Python than William Golding: “Your news overwhelms us, Sir Gawain. . . . But first tell us of this beast you speak of. What is its nature and does it threaten us even as we stand here?”

I wondered if Ishiguro, who grew up listening to his parents speak Japanese as a first language, bore similarities to Murakami because of some distinctly Japanese cultural trait with which I was simply unfamiliar. I asked Dwight Egan Sora, a high school friend who makes a living translating Japanese to English (he is also an actor). This is what he said:

“Having never read Murakami in Japanese, I can’t really comment on the accuracy of the translations. Interestingly, I never thought about the flatness of Ishiguro’s prose, but I always felt that there was an underlying Japanese sensibility to his stories and his character’s inner lives (Including the very-English Remains of the Day). A lot of Japanese art is focused on compression and brevity (such as in haiku), and the general tendency of those practicing those arts is to get even more compressed and spare over the years. There are a lot of factors behind this. The Buddhist-derived concept of “emptiness,” that negative space (whether emptiness in a painting or text) has its own significance and meaning equal to content. There’s also a fatalistic streak and sense of scarcity in the Japanese psyche (I always remind folks that despite being a major techno-economic power, it’s still a tiny nation of small islands with limited natural resources, little arable land, and located in a natural disaster zone prone to typhoons, earthquakes and tsunami) that emphasizes finding the most out of the least. I would say a lot of Japanese art and literature (both classic and modern) also often focuses on the banal and mundane in terms of subjects and observations, and sometimes opts for rather childish modes of expression. Exactly what this means is hard to say. However, there is a tendency in Japanese society to really force order, behavior and expectations upon children starting in elementary school, after a very carefree early childhood period. This rigidity and demand for seriousness pretty much continues through your entire adult working life. However, once you are entering your advanced years, you’re allowed to slip into rather childish behavior. Almost as if you are given a chance to reclaim opportunities to play denied earlier in life. I don’t know if any of that is helpful, but those are my notes.”

Dwight’s answer lent substance to a stab-in-the-dark question. His compression instinct rings true to my uninformed mind. I recognize that minimalist aesthetic from Japanese cuisine, with its tendency to value the innate flavor of the ingredients rather than shovel on seasoning, as Americans do. Compression is, of course, Ishiguro’s hallmark as a novelist, and Murakami directly discusses “negative space” as a concept in visual art in Killing Commendatore. Furthermore, the “childish behavior” diagnosis may explain Murakami’s banal choice of adjectives in his seventies, although I still find it mind boggling that his translator and editors would let him get away with “deep, amazing, and gorgeous.”

As for Ishiguro’s Japanese sensibility, I assumed the relentless politeness of his dialogue was a Japanese trait when I read Floating World, but it shows up in other settings, too. I always thought it odd that Stevens uses “Father” in place of pronouns when addressing his dad: “Father is tired tonight, I expect.” The daughter in Floating World does the same thing. “Japanese sensibility” may be the most logical explanation, unless using a parental title in place of pronouns is a British custom I don’t recognize.

Conclusion

In the end, comparative literature is about identifying shared characteristics. It is not about ranking books. If you have to do that, yes, Ishiguro is the clear victor. But Murakami’s ambition and originality score him serious points. It is not a tie, but Haruki holds his own.