The Long Goodbye to ‘Boku’：Reframing ‘Watashi’ in Killing Commendatore by Haruki Murakami

This study examines the shift in first-person narration in Killing Commendatore (2017) through its adoption of ‘watashi’ as the protagonist’s primary narrative pronoun. While the novel is often read as continuing the “Murakami-esque” aesthetics of mystery, surrealism, and ambiguity, the use of ‘watashi’ signals a deliberate narrative strategy by Haruki Murakami.</br>Murakami has previously distinguished ‘boku’ as a more personal “I,” in contrast to the social ‘watashi’, a distinction central to earlier works such as Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World (1985). These narratives construct divided subjectivities through shifts in first-person voice, a structure partly reconfigured in English translation through temporal differentiation.</br>In Killing Commendatore, however, ‘watashi’ reorients this framework. Although Anglophone readers do not directly perceive the ‘boku’/ ‘watashi’ distinction, they nonetheless encounter a comparable doubling of the self within a single “I” through shifts in tense. The novel also engages intertextually with American hard-boiled fiction, the works of Raymond Chandler, reworking motifs of a mysterious man who dies for the woman he loves. Furthermore, Murakami’s translation of Samuel Willenberg differentiates first-person voices to align fictional and historical subjects.</br>The novel constructs a layered form of first-person narration in which ‘watashi’ reconfigures narrative subjectivity towards a history shaped by multiple, varied selves. Through this shift, Murakami develops a first-person narrator who recounts a history intertwined with multiple selves.