Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Web of Murakami Magic                                                                             

Haruki Murakami’s last book 1Q84 was such an astounding achievement in fantasy fiction, his millions of fans must have wondered what he would next. The writer of such contemporary masterpieces as Kafka On The Shore and The Wind-up Bird Chronicle has never failed to awe and delight.

The Japanese writer’s books have been translated into dozens of languages, and for a while now, his name pops up every year as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature. Perhaps his huge popularity and relative ‘youth’ (he is just 65) comes in the way.

His latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, has all the elements familiar to Murakami readers (including bits of erotica), but it is also simpler in structure and more accessible than some of the earlier books. Maybe that will get him readers in even larger numbers— there have been grumbles about his plots being too complicated and his mysteries unresolved.

Colourless sold sold a million copies in a week in Japan—a record many writers would kill for—and rave reviews too. Philip Gabriel's English translation has kept the book on the bestseller list for months.

It is about the kind of adolescent trauma that many must have gone through and grown out of. But the protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki is unable to forget a slight, and his life comes to a halt.  At school, Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends, who, oddly enough, had names that had a colour in them—the two boys were called Akamatsu (red pine) and Oumi (blue sea), and the girls were were Shirane (white root) and Kurono (black field). Tazaki was the only one who lacked a colour and was the odd one out—if it weren’t for him, the group would have kind of symmetry, but they think of themselves as the five fingers of a hand.

One day his friends decide never to talk to him or see him ever again. Without giving any reason or explanation, they cut him out of their lives.

Tsukuru, whose name means ‘to make’ is obsessed with train stations and after completing his education finds his dream job, building and refurbishing stations. He has no other ambition in life and just one as yet unexpressed desire—to find out why his friends threw him out of their circle. The trauma caused him such crippling despair that he nearly committed suicide.

With great difficulty he befriends another young man, Haida, whose name means ‘gray field’, also a name with a colour. Haida and he swim together and the new buddy introduces him classical music. The strains of Le Mal du Pays, reminds him of the past, since Shiro used to play this piece on the piano. Then Haida vanishes too, leaving Tsukuru alone with his pain and bafflement.

Finally, it is girlfriend Sara who prods him to go on and connect with his old friends again and ask them why they banished him. To push him off the wall of self-pity that he has built around himself, the practical and efficient Sara traces the friends using the internet and gives him the nudge he needed to embark on his ‘pilgrimage’ to search for the truth. She realises that till he finds out the reason for his abandonment, he won’t be healed and their relationship will be doomed.

This time Murakami does not take the surreal or ambiguous route and actually lets Tsukuru find out what happened. Over the pages the reader comes to care for ‘colourless’ Tsukuru Tazaki, even if his self-inflicted misery would have been exasperating, were it not for Murakami’s gentle treatment of his conflicted protagonist.

Still, Tsukuru with his ordinariness and humility is one of Murakami’s most endearing characters, and this book compulsively readable. If a reader is entering the world of Murakami for the first time, then maybe Tsukuru’s story makes for a good introduction.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years Of Pilgrimage

By Haruki Murakami

Translated by Philip Gabriel

Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf

386 pages