Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

 This is the last book Murakami published (2017) and is one of the largest he wrote. It is more on a meta-level having to do with Ideas and Metaphors (and the scary, dangerous Double-Metaphors).  Descriptions of the book insist on relating it to "The Man in the White Subaru", but that is just one of the side threads, and these people who wrote the descriptions either did not read the entire book, or didn't understand it. 

The main character is a painter who makes a living painting commercial portraits for executives, which require very little creativity.  His wife of 6 years leaves him for another man and he moves out.  First he drives around Northern Japan, where he meets The Man with the White Subaru and the skinny girl who wants him to choke her during sex.

Eventually he settles in the abandoned house on a top of a mountain of the great Japanese painter Tomohiko Amada where he discovers an unknown painting of his called "Killing Commendatore." After hearing a bell at night and excavating a Buddhist pit on the property, he is visited by an Idea in the form of 2-foot Commendatore who eventually has the main character kill him in front of the near-comatose Tomohiko Amada (who was tortured by Nazis/SS in Austria during the Anschluss).  

There is a Menshiki character involved, who lives in a huge white mansion across from the main character, drives Jaguars and has some kind of a shady past.  He bought the mansion to observe a 13-year old girl living across the house, Mariye, who might or might not be his biological daughter.  Menshiki joins the main character in exploring the pit, and then having him paint his portrait and the portrait of Mariye, in order to get closer to her. 

Things get hairy with lots of twists and turns, as in most Murakami books, there is even a fantastic trip underground through the "Path of the Metaphor", however eventually many things get unresolved.  We never learn who is the Man in the White Subaru or the girl in the love hotel who likes choking during sex.  We never learn what happens with Menshiki and Mariye, and the main character getting back with his former/estranged wife Yuzu who had a child by another man is very unpersuasive. 

It seems that the book is more of an exploration of Ideas and Metaphors and the creative process, rather than a book about characters and their lives.  The best parts are those that remind of the Wind-Up bird chronicle, like the pit and the going through the tunnel to be reborn in the pit itself.  It is quite a long book and some parts are really meta to such a level to be almost unreadable, which is very rare with Murakami's books.