Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Phew, this is probably the first Murakami I've actually completed. My last abortive attempt was perhaps not the best starting point with his works (Hard-Boiled Wonderland) so I'm really glad that this one was much more successful. This was OK, I'd give it a 3.5/5.

The story follows Tsukuru Tazaki and basically his attempts to reconcile himself with his past, specifically his history with four high school friends, each aptly with a colour in their names. Because he is the only one without a colour, they call him Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, and the nickname stuck. When he moves to Tokyo for college, at first all seems well but suddenly and apparently out of nowhere, all four of his friends cut off all ties with him and refuse to speak or see him again. The shock and sudden absence of this friend group, which had formed the core of Tsukuru's life, threw him into a downward spiral. Years and years later when Tsukuru is in his mid-30s, he is encouraged by a girlfriend, the first one he feels deeply for, to look back at his past and find out what really happened so that he can put down the burden and move on with his own life.

As you might expect from such a story, there are a fair bit of time jumps in the narrative. This isn't super jarring, but also isn't as smooth as I would've expected. We also get to see and hear a lot of side characters who appear and then disappear, and hear stories that seem like they may have some significant importance to the overarching plot but end up not. On some level, I wonder if that's the point. Tsukuru's one big passion in life is railway stations - he loves everything about them, from the way they are designed to safely transition commuters from platform to train, to the way they are the one stationary spot in a world that's endlessly changing. Tsukuru himself can be likened to such a train, remaining rooted to that same spot from that very moment when his group of high school friends abandoned him. People come and go in Tsukuru's life, often without warning either way, and he has to grow used to the idea of basically losing people out of nowhere.

This book would probably be much more of a hit with people who enjoy leaving a lot of things open to interpretation, but if you're like me and want something that wraps most, if not all, plot elements up nicely by the end, this book may not quite satisfy. Still though, despite the lack of a resolution, I did somewhat enjoy reading this. There was something compelling, an onward motion to the narrative of this book that kept you going and going trying to figure out why things happened. We don't always get concrete answers to every question in the end, but I think we get enough of an ending that it isn't completely left dangling out of nowhere either. It's a great book to read for a book club.

From this, I can hopefully assume that I am perhaps more inclined to enjoy Murakami's less abstract and more “real-life” works, like this one.