Book review: Killing Commendatore, by Haruki Murakami

Haruki Murakami, world-wide bestseller and, apparently, devoted admirer of Scott Fitzgerald, translated The Great Gatsby into Japanese, and this new novel has been described as a homage to Fitzgerald, or at least Gatsby. There is a resemblance in his latest novel, in that there is a mysteriously and tantalisingly rich Gatsby-like figure at the heart of the fiction, but whereas Fitzgerald’s novel is slim, elegant and true to experience, Murakami’s is one of these baggy old monstrous novels into which the author stuffs anything that takes his fancy. It has recently been deemed obscene in Hong Kong on account of explicit descriptions of sex, though they are no more explicit than anything found in lots of novels.