In Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, houses play a central role.
There’s the protagonist’s own home, the setting for his separation with his wife. Murakami uses this house to explore the protaganist’s evolving emotions about his marriage.
The protagonist then moves to a rural mountaintop village. He occupies the vacant house of a deceased famous artist. He discovers the artist’s secret work, Killing Commendatore. That house and painting remains the principal setting for the rest of the novel.
There’s also a Jay Gatsby-like character. He lives in a huge, beautiful mansion across the valley from where the protagonist is staying. This mysterious mansion is a key plot device in the story.
In the novel, each house represents something that was lost. The houses reflect their inhabitants’ lives and stories. It channels the charaters’ emotions as they search for meaning in their lives. (The grand theme of all Murakami novels). As the characters interact, they experience different expressions of the houses.
This week, I encountered that for myself.
I stayed in my in-laws’ for two nights this week. Both nights, I worked late, typing and scribbling away as dawn beckoned. Sitting in the living room alone, I felt like an unannounced guest borrowing the place. Like someone who pops into a neighbourhood hotel lobby to use the wifi.
My parents were traveling in Shanghai. One night I stopped by my parents’ house at 10pm to borrow my dad’s car. I had spent twenty years growing up in this house. The house was dark and quiet, no signs of life. The house was on hold, paused while its inhabitants were away. I moved out two years ago. The house had wiped all traces of my presence. It had no space left for me.
On Wednesday, I spent a night in my own house. My wife and daughters stayed put at my in-laws’. The condo was quiet, lacking its usual inhabitants. There’s something unsettling about entering a quiet empty house, especially at night. Like I’m intruding, disturbing the peace. Without my family, it doesn’t feel like my own house. It looks the same, but feels less solid. Like an alternate reality inside a mirror world.
Last Saturday was Winter Solstice. A big day for the Chinese. I spent it with my grandma. My father built three houses next to each other. My grandma stayed in one and we stayed in another. It’s a big and empty house. It was built to house a new generation of memories. But it housed empty artifacts and dust for more than 300 days a year. Meanwhile, old memories disappeared. They aged and rotted along with the hardwood timber frames at my grandpa’s old shophouse. Chipped away by weather and termites.
As an architect and builder, we only ever provide up to half of the complete picture. An empty container, like Tupperware made of bricks and concrete. People fill in contents and change the container forever. Gives it a patina of human connection and individual meaning.
Why did early AirBnb users prefer staying in strangers’ houses? Before the explosion in cookie-cutter instagram designs and professional property managers. Is everyone so lonely, craving for the chance to glimpse into the window of another soul? Searching for a human connection in this ocean of manufactured modernity?