I’m a huge Haruki Murakami fan. His latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki: And His Years of Pilgrimage doesn’t disappoint. While not quite as richly textured as some of his longer, stranger novels, there’s nonetheless a vivid, intoxicating mood to Colorless Tsukura’s story.
The book is easy to read. There’s a core story told with few characters: A young man gets exiled from his childhood best friends and tries to understand why. As he comes of age, he struggles to form new friends and romantic partners in adulthood as a man who, in his own estimation, is utterly ordinary (“colorless”).
The unstoppable flow of time becomes a central theme. In one of my favorite passages, Tsukuru is with an old female friend from high school. They hadn’t seen each other in a long, long time. She is now happily married and living abroad. As they reminisce about what once was, she confesses to having a crush on Tsukuru back when they grew up. She says, “That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.”
Opportunities bloom and wilt before you’ve even noticed them. Friendships that seemed unshakable somehow manage to peter out, but new ones form with a beautiful immediacy. Soon the future becomes the past. You can only wonder what would have happened had you made a different decision at some crossroad along the way. These are the sorts of thoughts I had when I read the book; the tone of the book is wistful.
As with all Murakami, Japanophiles will appreciate some the ambient descriptions. The protagonist’s profession is as a designer of train stations. There are some lovely scenes set in Shinjuku station, describing the orderly chaos that you have to see to believe.
I loved this final paragraph from the NYT review of the book:
The writer sits at his desk and makes us a story. A story not knowing where it is going, not knowing itself to be magic. Closure is an illusion, the winking of the eye of a storm. Nothing is completely resolved in life, nothing is perfect. The important thing is to keep living because only by living can you see what happens next.
Only by living can you see what happens next.