A “colorless” book review no one asked for
There is an author hailing from Japan by the name of Haruki Murakami. He’s kind of famous, if you’re any sort of a reader, you’ve probably heard of him. I’ve read almost all of his works, maybe missed one or two, but I’ll get to them. One of his books I read a couple of years ago is this one called Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage and it was very good. It’s both easy to read and not so easy to understand but that’s what makes it good.
The story follows a protagonist’s journey of self-discovery and recovery. Although no fault of his own, a single event in his youth has drowned him into a state of perpetual confusion and guilt. One event always leads to another and that (usually) means that there is no going back. The weight of this existential pressure drained the life out of Tsukuru which I personally find quite relatable. His negligible physical appearance, sedentary living habits and his desolate social relationships — “colorless”.
“Every person has their own color”
“Every person has their own color” I love how Murakami plays with this in the book. The supporting characters, the friends of Tsukuru, all have last names with colours ingrained in them. All except our protagonist. This alone would understandably cause him as a young boy to feel left out by default. Tsukuru’s feeling of being excluded increases dramatically during college, when suddenly, without warning, his entire group of friends drops him. They don’t return his phone calls, and they announce that they never want to see him or talk to him again.
“It was a sudden, decisive declaration, with no room for compromise. They gave no explanation, not a word, for this harsh pronouncement. And Tsukuru didn’t dare ask.”
What kind of person wouldn’t dare ask? (But if I’m being completely honest, I too, wouldn’t ask) There’s such a modest, reluctant quality to this character, a drifting uncertainty that is both infuriating and identifiably human. Why Tsukuru’s friends dropped him is the central mystery driving this novel.
Tsukuru doesn’t know why his friends left him when we meet him at the beginning and he goes on this journey of tracking down his friends to get answers to questions I assume he’s had stuck in his head for years. Sometimes we try to hide negative events inside of us, to forget. But each event leads to another one and another and inevitably changes us somehow. Sometimes we don’t look for answers, we simply accept. We bury ourselves. Some may see the lack of an actual closure to Tsukuru’s story as a fault in the prose but I think it’s about the long way of discovering who we are and for someone as “colorless” as our protagonist is written, it makes sense that his journey would be a long one. Sometimes we just need that little bit of a push to start searching for answers. And perhaps sometimes the push leads you to answer your own questions, write your own narrative and create your own colour.
“(Tsukuru) could never relax around people he’d just met”
Tsukuru was only able to start confronting his past trauma once he met new people - Haida and Sara - way into his adulthood. And this is a big deal simply because he spent so many years just kind of there. These new people were his push. Over the course of the pilgrimage there are moments of gorgeous, contemplative prose. Murakami writes, “The branches of a nearby willow tree were laden with lush foliage and drooping heavily, almost to the ground, though they were still, as if lost in deep thought. Occasionally a small bird landed unsteadily on a branch, but soon gave up and fluttered away. Like a distraught mind, the branch quivered slightly, then returned to stillness."
I also personally enjoyed this moment in the book — a story-within-the-story about a piano player who has accepted death in exchange for supernaturally enhanced sight. This tale was so significant to me. Without it the novel would just be like a small, personal story about a young man looking for closure which I’m sure would still be a good read. However, the little piano player tale elevates the day-to-day existence of a lost character, and closes the proximity between the ordinary and the fantastical. Murakami provides a dose of his brand of originality, made up of sex, music, ghosts, auras, alienation, interlaced in a story about a man essentially yearning for connection.
Speaking of connection while not giving too much of the story away, Sara ends up being his girlfriend for a while and then she’s not anymore. Against another character’s advice, he decides to press Sara on whether she is seeing someone else. Sara says she will need three days to reply. After a late-night confession of love via phone-call, the novel ends with Tsukuru still waiting. The way I see it, Murakami hinted at a happy-ever-after ending when he said that Tsukuru planned to propose to Sara if she chose him. But the girl is not important. In fact, it was not about a girl. I think it all boils down to this:
If Sara chooses him, he has grown as a person. That was his journey and the purpose of his pilgrimage.
The novel is full of colour, thousands of syllables long. Worth the read, if you ask me. One of Murakami’s best works and that really is saying something considering his repertoire.
