Point of View

Killing Commendatore is told in the first person throughout, and is always told from the point of view of the unnamed artist, the novel's protagonist. In the final chapter, the artist presents Mariye's narrative of being trapped in Menshiki's house, but this story, too, is mediated by the artist's words and perspective. The events of Killing Commendatore take place several years before the present tense of the novel, and the point at which the artist narrates them. He frequently digresses in his storytelling to include memories or other events that he had previously neglected to mention.

Murakami makes use of the perspective in two key ways. One is that his view is limited, and sometimes quite literally limited in terms of what he can see in front of him — consider, for example, his emergence into the pit in the wood, when it takes the artist...