Bringing a Canon to a Knife-fight – Phenomenological Ethics and Metaphor in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore

This essay reads Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore (2017) by way of Husserlian phenomenology as interpreted by Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida. The essay proposes that Murakami’s text functions both as an example of and an original contribution to that tradition. The story follows a nameless portraitist as he mediates the enigmatic relationships between his neighbours. Through the narrative’s necessarily self-aware commentaries on the nature of art and its creation, Killing Commendatore’s phenomenological contributions consider the ethics of coming to know others by way of their artistic rendering, especially through their faces. In so doing, by its own complicated logic, Murakami’s novel becomes a meditation on murder, and the witnessing thereof.