KILLING COMMENDATORE. Translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen

London: Harvill Secker, 2017. First edition in English. A fine copy in a fine dust jacket. First published in Japan in two volumes; The Idea Made Visible & The Shifting Metaphor in 2017. The first edition in English, one volume, was published simultaneously by Knopf in the U.S. and in London by Harvill Secker in October of 2018. The protagonist is an unnamed portrait painter whose wife leaves him at the start of the book. Devastated, he quits portrait painting and goes on a long road trip. In the middle of his road trip he meets a nervous woman in a diner who seems to be running away from someone. The protagonist suspects that she is running away from a man who sits nearby while they eat. The protagonist nicknames this man as the man with the white Subaru Forester. The woman and the protagonist end up going to a love hotel and having violent sex. The next day, he wakes up and she is already gone. He goes back to the diner and sees the man with the white Subaru again and he feels as though the man knows exactly what he did with the nervous woman at the love hotel. The protagonist's road trip comes to an end when his car breaks down. He then moves into the remote house of his friend's father, Tomohiko Amada, a renowned painter who has been moved to a nursing home. There in the attic he discovers an owl living in it and an unknown painting by Tomohiko, Killing Commendatore, depicting a scene from the opera Don Giovanni. He starts working as an art teacher to make ends meet in the village. Meanwhile, a wealthy neighbour, Wataru Menshiki, offers him a very large sum of money to paint his portrait which he eventually agrees to do. He ends up creating a portrait unlike anything he has done before and it inspires him to begin a portrait of the man with the white Subaru.