Twenty-eight hours and twenty-seven minutes. Let me just sit with that number for a second. That's longer than most professional development workshops I've survived in two decades of teaching - and somehow Murakami makes it feel both too long and not nearly enough. I have complaints. I have feelings. I spent an entire week of lakefront walks with Denise on this thing, and by hour fifteen she asked me why I kept stopping mid-stride to stare at the water. Because Murakami does that to you. He makes you stop and stare at things.
Here's my gripe, though: Murakami has never met a paragraph he couldn't stretch into three pages. There are passages in the middle of this book - the protagonist painting portraits, thinking about painting portraits, thinking about thinking about painting portraits - where the narrative just... drifts. Like a boat someone forgot to tie up. I could feel some listeners bailing here. And honestly? I get it. But I also think those listeners are missing the point, which is that the drift IS the point. This is a novel about a man who's lost the rope entirely.
The Two-Foot-Tall Idea That Shouldn't Work (But Does)
Let's talk about what Murakami is really doing here. You've got a thirty-something portrait painter whose wife leaves him, and he ends up in a dead artist's mountain house, and he finds a hidden painting called "Killing Commendatore" - a reimagining of Don Giovanni in classical Japanese style. And then the Commendatore from the painting shows up. As a two-foot-tall being. Who speaks in archaic pronouns and calls himself an Idea.
On paper, this is absurd. My students would hate this. I love it.
The Commendatore scenes are where Kirby Heyborne's narration actually clicks into something special. He gives this character an enigmatic, slightly formal delivery that captures the bizarre dignity of a tiny supernatural being who insists on being taken seriously. It's the right call - playing it straight instead of going cartoonish. The contrast between the Commendatore's odd formality and the protagonist's flat, emotionally distant inner monologue creates this strange tension that's pure Murakami.
But here's where the listening experience gets complicated. Heyborne's measured tone works beautifully for the narrator's emotional numbness - this guy has lost his wife, his purpose, his sense of self, and Heyborne sounds like someone walking through fog. Perfect. Except that same measured quality tips into something robotic during longer stretches. He has this habit of letting sentences deflate at the end, dropping from emphasis to monotone mid-thought, and after twenty-eight hours, you notice it. You notice it a lot.
The Bell, The Pit, and 1943 Vienna
The structure of this novel is sneaky. You think you're reading a quiet domestic drama about a sad painter, and then there's a mysterious bell ringing from a stone pit in the woods, and then you're in 1943 Vienna watching Tomohiko Amada's involvement in a failed assassination attempt against the Nazis, and then you're in an underworld being chased by something called Double Metaphors. Murakami layers these timelines and realities the way a good painter layers oils - you can see through one to the next if you look carefully enough.
This is why we still read the classics, and why Murakami belongs in conversation with them. The book's explicit homage to The Great Gatsby isn't just name-dropping. Menshiki - the dapper, wealthy, mysterious neighbor across the valley - is Gatsby filtered through Japanese magical realism. He's obsessed with a girl who might be his daughter, watching her house from his pristine white mansion, constructing elaborate schemes just to be near her. But where Fitzgerald gave us green lights, Murakami gives us a pit in the woods and a painting that bleeds between worlds. The prose deserves to be savored.
I listened at 1.0x. Of course I did. At twenty-eight hours, some people would call that masochistic. I call it respecting Murakami's pacing, which is deliberate even when it's testing your patience. (I was grading sophomore essays during the slower sections. Both activities require a similar tolerance for wandering.)
Who Gets Lost in the Pit - And Who Climbs Out
If you loved Kafka on the Shore, this is its spiritual successor - same dreamy logic, same wells and underground passages, same sense that reality is a membrane you can push through if you press hard enough. But it's also baggier, more indulgent, more willing to let scenes breathe past the point where breathing becomes waiting.
If you're new to Murakami, don't start here. Start with Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka. Come to Commendatore when you've already accepted that Murakami will take twenty pages to describe making pasta and you'll somehow be riveted.
If you're a Murakami devotee, Heyborne's narration is good enough - sometimes genuinely good, sometimes frustratingly mechanical - but it won't ruin the experience. The monotone endings are a real thing, and they bothered me during the Vienna flashback sections where the emotional stakes demanded more. But his handling of the protagonist's detachment is honestly inspired casting. The narrator understands that pause is punctuation.
Worth Pausing the Faculty Meeting For
This is a flawed, sprawling, strange, beautiful book about how art saves us and what we sacrifice to make it. It's too long and I wouldn't cut a word. Heyborne is imperfect and I wouldn't trade him out. The whole thing is a paradox - which, come to think of it, is exactly what Murakami intended. An Idea made physical. A painting that kills. A novel that takes twenty-eight hours to say something about loneliness that hits you in thirty seconds.
My 47 podcast listeners are getting a three-part series on this one. Mom, you can sleep through the Gatsby parallels. I won't be offended.
