Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (EPUB)

Description

An instant #1 New York Times BestsellerOne of the most revered voices in literature today gives us a story of love, friend­ship, and heartbreak for the ages.Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present.A New York Times and Washington Post notable book, and one of the Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, and BookPage’s best books of the year

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book One of the Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, and BookPage’s Best Books of the Year “Mesmerizing, immersive, hallucinogenic.” —Entertainment Weekly“Readers wait for [Murakami’s] work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan…. Reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down…. A book for both the new and experienced reader.” —Patti Smith, The New York Times Book Review “Hypnotic.” —The Boston Globe “Brilliant.” —The Miami Herald “A masterpiece.” —Elle “Wistful, mysterious, winsome, disturbing, seductive.” —The Atlantic “Remarkable.” —The Washington Post “Intoxicating…. Full of beauty, strangeness, and color.” —NPR“[Murakami] is ever alert to minds and hearts, to what it is, precisely, that they feel and see, and to humanity’s abiding and indomitable spirit…. A deeply affecting novel, not only for the dark nooks and crannies it explores, but for the magic that seeps into its characters’ subconsciouses, for the lengths to which they will go to protect or damage one another, for the brilliant characterizations it delivers along the way.” —The Washington Post “More than just a story but rather a meditation…. There is a rawness, a vulnerability, to these characters.” —Los Angeles Times “Tsukuru’s pilgrimage will never end, because he is moving constantly away from his destination, which is his old self. This is a narrow poignancy, but a powerful one, and Murakami is its master. Perhaps that’s why he has come to speak not just for his thwarted nation, but for so many of us who love art—since it’s only there, alas, in novels such as this one, that we’re allowed to live twice.” —Chicago Tribune “Bold and colorful threads of fiction blur smoothly together to form the muted white of an almost ordinary realism. Like J.M. Coetzee, Murakami smoothly interlaces allegorical meanings with everyday particulars of contemporary social reality…. Tsukuru’s situation will resonate with anyone who feels adrift in this age of Google and Facebook.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Colorless Tsukuru spins a weave of … vivid images around a great mystery…. The story flows along smoothly, wrapping around details like objects in a stream.” —The Boston Globe “The premise is simple enough, but in the works of Murakami, nothing is simple…. A perfect introduction to Murakami’s world, where questions of guilt and motivation abound, and the future is an open question.” —The Miami Herald “Beautiful, rich with moving images and lush yet exquisitely controlled language…. Fans of elegant, intelligent fiction will welcome this book.” —Tampa Bay Times “Moving…. One of Murakami’s most endearing and enduring traits as a writer is an almost reportorial attention to detail, the combined effect of which gives you a complete picture while still feeling a little ethereal.” —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel “Shockingly seductive…. Murakami has a knack for swift, seamless storytelling…. Don’t be surprised if you devour Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in the course of a night or two…. Charming and unexpected.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch “Satisfying…. Murakami can find mystery in the mundane and conjure it in sparse, Raymond Carveresque prose.” —Financial Times “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki alights in some mysterious places but doesn’t settle there…. [It] is replete with emotionally frank, philosophical discussions…. Reflective.” —The Dallas Morning News “A piercing and surprisingly compact story about friendship and loneliness…. Murakami skillfully explores the depths of Tsukuru’s isolation and pain.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch “Truly captivating … Calling Murakami a ‘universally respected author’ or even a ‘paragon of literature’ is no longer apt. The man is a cultural force unto himself…. [In Colorless Tsukuru] the staples of his work … all come together to form a beautiful whole.” —A.V. Club “Spare and contained…. Quiet, with disturbing depths.” —The Columbus Dispatch “A testament to the mystery, magic, and mastery of this much-revered Japanese writer’s imaginative powers. Murakami’s moxie is characterized by a brilliant detective-story-like blend of intuition, hard-nosed logic, impeccable pacing, and poetic revelations.” —Elle About the Author Haruki Murakamiwas born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages. The most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul. Translated by Philip Gabriel. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. From July of his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying. He turned twenty during this time, but this special watershed—becoming an adult—meant nothing. Taking his own life seemed the most natural solution, and even now he couldn’t say why he hadn’t taken this final step. Crossing that threshold between life and death would have been easier than swallowing down a slick, raw egg. Perhaps he didn’t commit suicide then because he couldn’t conceive of a method that fit the pure and intense feelings he had toward death. But method was beside the point. If there had been a door within reach that led straight to death, he wouldn’t have hesitated to push it open, without a second thought, as if it were just a part of ordinary life. For better or for worse, though, there was no such door nearby. I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and now, wouldn’t exist. It was a captivating, bewitching thought. The present world wouldn’t exist, and reality would no longer be real. As far as this world was concerned, he would simply no longer exist—just as this world would no longer exist for him. At the same time, Tsukuru couldn’t fathom why he had reached this point, where he was teetering over the precipice. There was an actual event that had led him to this place—this he knew all too well—but why should death have such a hold over him, enveloping him in its embrace for nearly half a year? Envelop—the word expressed it precisely. Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Tsukuru had fallen into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost in a dark, stagnant void.It was as if he were sleepwalking through life, as if he had already died but not yet noticed it. When the sun rose, so would Tsukuru—he’d brush his teeth, throw on whatever clothes were at hand, ride the train to college, and take notes in class. Like a person in a storm desperately grasping at a lamppost, he clung to this daily routine. He only spoke to people when necessary, and after school, he would return to his solitary apartment, sit on the floor, lean back against the wall, and ponder death and the failures of his life. Before him lay a huge, dark abyss that ran straight through to the earth’s core. All he could see was a thick cloud of nothingness swirling around him; all he could hear was a profound silence squeezing his eardrums.When he wasn’t thinking about death, his mind was blank. It wasn’t hard to keep from thinking. He didn’t read any newspapers, didn’t listen to music, and had no sexual desire to speak of. Events occurring in the outside world were, to him, inconsequential. When he grew tired of his room, he wandered aimlessly around the neighborhood or went to the station, where he sat on a bench and watched the trains arriving and departing, over and over again. He took a shower every morning, shampooed his hair well, and did the laundry twice a week. Cleanliness was another one of his pillars: laundry, bathing, and teeth brushing. He barely noticed what he ate. He had lunch at the college cafeteria, but other than that, he hardly consumed a decent meal. When he felt hungry he stopped by the local supermarket and bought an apple or some vegetables. Sometimes he ate plain bread, washing it down with milk straight from the carton. When it was time to sleep, he’d gulp down a glass of whiskey as if it were a dose of medicine. Luckily he wasn’t much of a drinker, and a small dose of alcohol was all it took to send him off to sleep. He never dreamed. But even if he had dreamed, even if dreamlike images arose from the edges of his mind, they would have found nowhere to perch on the slippery slopes of his consciousness, instead quickly sliding off, down into the void. The reason why death had such a hold on Tsukuru Tazaki was clear. One day his four closest friends, the friends he’d known for a long time, announced that they did not want to see him, or talk with him, ever 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. He’d been friends with the four of them since high school, though when they cut him off, Tsukuru had already left his hometown and was attending college in Tokyo. So being banished didn’t have any immediate negative effects on his daily routine—it wasn’t like there would be awkward moments when he’d run into them on the street. But that was just quibbling. The pain he felt was, if anything, more intense, and weighed down on him even more greatly because of the physical distance. Alienation and loneliness became a cable that stretched hundreds of miles long, pulled to the breaking point by a gigantic winch. And through that taut line, day and night, he received indecipherable messages. Like a gale blowing between trees, those messages varied in strength as they reached him in fragments, stinging his ears. The five of them had been classmates at a public high school in the suburbs of Nagoya. Three boys, and two girls. During summer vacation of their freshman year, they all did some volunteer work together and became friends. Even after freshman year, when they were in different classes, they remained a close-knit group. The volunteer work that had brought them together had been part of a social studies summer assignment, but even after it ended, they chose to volunteer as a group. Besides the volunteer work, they went hiking together on holidays, played tennis, swam at the Chita Peninsula, or got together at one of their houses to study for tests. Or else—and this was what they did most often—they just hung out someplace, and talked for hours. It wasn’t like they showed up with a topic in mind—they just never ran out of things to talk about.Pure chance had brought them together. There were several volunteer opportunities they could have chosen from, but the one they all chose, independently, was an after-school tutoring program for elementary school kids (most of whom were children who refused to go to school). The program was run by a Catholic church, and of the thirty-five students in their high school class, the five of them were the only ones who selected it. To start, they participated in a three-day summer camp outside Nagoya, and got to be good friends with the children. Whenever they took a break, the five of them gathered to talk. They got to know each other better, sharing their ideas and opening up about their dreams, as well as their problems. And when the summer camp was over, each one of them felt they were in the right place, where they needed to be, with the perfect companions. A unique sense of harmony developed between them—each one needed the other four and, in turn, shared the sense that they too were needed. The whole convergence was like a lucky but entirely accidental chemical fusion, something that could only happen once. You might gather the same materials and make identical preparations, but you would never be able to duplicate the result.After the initial volunteer period, they spent about two weekends a month at the after-school program, teaching the kids, reading to them, playing with them. They mowed the lawn, painted the building, and repaired playground equipment. They continued this work for the next two years, until they graduated from high school.The only source of tension among them was the uneven number—the fact that their group was comprised of three boys and two girls. If two of the boys and two of the girls became couples, the remaining boy would be left out. That possibility must have always been hanging over their heads like a small, thick, lenticular cloud. But it never happened, nor did it even seem a likely possibility. Perhaps coincidentally, all five of them were from suburban, upper-middle-class families. Their parents were baby boomers; their fathers were all professionals. Their parents spared no expense when it came to their children’s education. On the surface, at least, their families were peaceful, and stable. None of their parents got divorced, and most of them had stay-at-home mothers. Their high school emphasized academics, and their grades were uniformly good. Overall there were far more similarities than differences in their everyday environments. And aside from Tsukuru Tazaki, they had another small, coincidental point in common: their last names all contained a color. The two boys’ last names were Akamatsu—which means “red pine”—and Oumi—“blue sea”; the girls’ family names were Shirane—“white root”—and Kurono—“black field.” Tazaki was the only last name that did not have a color in its meaning. From the very beginning this fact made him feel a little bit left out. Of course, whether or not you had a color as part of your name had nothing to do with your personality. Tsukuru understood this. But still, it disappointed him, and he surprised himself by feeling hurt. Soon, the other four friends began to use nicknames: the boys were called Aka (red) and Ao (blue); and the girls were Shiro (white) and Kuro (black). But he just remained Tsukuru. How great it would be, he often thought, if I had a color in my name too. Then everything would be perfect. Aka was the one with the best grades. He never seemed to study hard, yet was at the top of his class in every subject. He never bragged about his grades, however, and preferred to cautiously stay in the background, almost as if he were embarrassed to be so smart. But as often is the case with short people—he never grew past five foot three—once he made up his mind about something, no matter how trivial it might be, he never backed down. And he was bothered by illogical rules and by teachers who couldn’t meet his exacting standards. He hated to lose; whenever he lost a tennis match, it put him in a bad mood. He didn’t act out, or pout—instead, he just became unusually quiet. The other four friends found his short temper amusing and often teased him about it. Eventually Aka would always break down and laugh along with them. His father was a professor of economics at Nagoya University.Ao was impressively built, with wide shoulders and a barrel chest, as well as a broad forehead, a generous mouth, and an imposing nose. He was a forward on the rugby team, and in his senior year he was elected team captain. He really hustled on the field and was constantly getting cuts and bruises. He wasn’t good at buckling down and studying, but he was a cheerful person and enormously popular among his classmates. He always looked people straight in the eye, spoke in a clear, strong voice, and had an amazing appetite, seeming to enjoy everything set down in front of him. He also had a quick recall of people’s names and faces, and seldom said anything bad about anyone else. He was a good listener and a born leader. Tsukuru could never forget the way he’d gather his team around him before a match to give them a pep talk. “Listen up!” Ao would bellow. “We’re going to win. The only question is how and by how much. Losing is not an option for us. You hear me? Losing is not an option!”“Not an option!” the team would shout, before rushing out onto the field.Not that their high school rugby team was all that good. Ao was clever and extremely athletic, but the team itself was mediocre. When they went up against teams from private schools, where players had been recruited from all over the country on athletic scholarships, Ao’s team usually lost. “What’s important,” he’d tell his friends, “is the will to win. In the real world we can’t always win. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose.”“And sometimes you get rained out,” Kuro remarked, with typical sarcasm.Ao shook his head sadly. “You’re confusing rugby with baseball or tennis. Rugby’s never postponed on account of rain.”“You play even when it’s raining?” Shiro asked, surprised. Shiro knew next to nothing about sports, and had zero interest in them.“That’s right,” Aka said seriously. “Rugby matches are never canceled. No matter how hard it rains. That’s why every year you get a lot of players who drown during matches.”“My God, that’s awful!” Shiro said.“Don’t be silly. He’s joking,” Kuro said, in a slightly disgusted tone.“If you don’t mind,” Ao went on, “my point is that if you’re an athlete you have to learn how to be a good loser.”“You certainly get a lot of practice with that every day,” Kuro said.Shiro was tall and slim, with a model’s body and the graceful features of a traditional Japanese doll. Her long hair was a silky, lustrous black. Most people who passed her on the street would turn around for a second look, but she seemed to find her beauty embarrassing. She was a serious person, who above all else disliked drawing attention to herself. She was also a wonderful, skilled pianist, though she would never play for someone she didn’t know. She seemed happiest while teaching piano to children in an after-school program. During these lessons, Shiro looked completely relaxed, more relaxed than Tsukuru saw her at any other time. Several of the children, Shiro said, might not be good at regular schoolwork, but they had a natural talent for music and it would be a shame to not develop it. The school only had an old upright piano, almost an antique, so the five of them started a fund-raising drive to buy a new one. They worked part-time during summer vacation, and persuaded a company that made musical instruments to help them out. In the spring of their senior year, their hard work finally paid off, resulting in the purchase of a grand piano for the school. Their campaign caught people’s attention and was even featured in a newspaper.Shiro was usually quiet, but she loved animals so much that when a conversation turned to dogs and cats, her face lit up and the words would cascade out from her. Her dream was to become a veterinarian, though Tsukuru couldn’t picture her with a scalpel, slicing open the belly of a Labrador retriever, or sticking her hand up the anus of a horse. If she went to vet school, that’s exactly the kind of training she’d have to do. Her father ran an ob-gyn clinic in Nagoya.Kuro wasn’t beautiful, but she was eager and charming and always curious. She was large-boned and full-bodied, and already had a well-developed bust by the time she was sixteen. She was independent and tough, with a mind as quick as her tongue. She did well in humanities subjects, but was hopeless at math and physics. Her father ran an accounting firm in Nagoya, but there was no way she would ever be able to help out. Tsukuru often helped her with her math homework. She could be sarcastic but had a unique, refreshing sense of humor, and he found talking with her fun and stimulating. She was a great reader, too, and always had a book under her arm. Shiro and Kuro had been in the same class in junior high and knew each other well, even before the five of them became friends. To see them together was a wonderful sight: a unique and captivating combination of a beautiful, shy artist and a clever, sarcastic comedian. Tsukuru Tazaki was the only one in the group without anything special about him. His grades were slightly above average. He wasn’t especially interested in academics, though he did pay close attention during class and always made sure to do the minimum amount of practice and review needed to get by. From the time he was little, that was his habit, no different from washing your hands before you eat and brushing your teeth after a meal. So although his grades were never stellar, he always passed his classes with ease. As long as he kept his grades up, his parents were never inclined to pester him to attend cram school or study with a tutor.He didn’t mind sports but never was interested enough to join a team. He’d play the occasional game of tennis with his family or friends, and go skiing or swimming every once in a while. That was about it. He was pretty good-looking, and sometimes people even told him so, but what they really meant was that he had no particular defects to speak of. Sometimes, when he looked at his face in the mirror, he detected an incurable boredom. He had no deep interest in the arts, no hobby or special skill. He was, if anything, a bit taciturn; he blushed easily, wasn’t especially outgoing, and could never relax around people he’d just met.If pressed to identify something special about him, one might notice that his family was the most affluent of the five friends, or that an aunt on his mother’s side was an actress—not a star by any means, but still fairly well known. But when it came to Tsukuru himself, there was not one single quality he possessed that was worth bragging about or showing off to others. At least that was how he viewed himself. Everything about him was middling, pallid, lacking in color.The only real interest he had was train stations. He wasn’t sure why, but for as long as he could remember, he had loved to observe train stations—they had always appealed to him. Huge bullet-train stations; tiny, one-track stations out in the countryside; rudimentary freight-collection stations—it didn’t matter what kind, because as long as it was a railway station, he loved it. Everything about stations moved him deeply. Like most little boys he enjoyed assembling model trains, but what really fascinated him weren’t the elaborate locomotives or cars, the intricately intersecting rail tracks, or the cleverly designed dioramas. No, it was the models of ordinary stations set down among the other parts, like an afterthought. He loved to watch as the trains passed by the station, or slowed down as they pulled up to the platform. He could picture the passengers coming and going, the announcements on the speaker system, the ringing of the signal as a train was about to depart, the station employees briskly going about their duties. What was real and what was imaginary mingled in his mind, and he’d tremble sometimes with the excitement of it all. But he could never adequately explain to people why he was so attracted to the stations. Even if he could, he knew they would think he was one weird kid. And sometimes Tsukuru himself wondered if something wasn’t exactly right with him.Though he lacked a striking personality, or any qualities that made him stand out, and despite always aiming for what was average, the middle of the road, there was (or seemed to be) something about him that wasn’t exactly normal, something that set him apart. And this contradiction continued to perplex and confuse him, from his boyhood all the way to the present, when he was thirty-six years old. Sometimes the confusion was momentary and insubstantial, at other times deep and profound. Sometimes Tsukuru couldn’t understand why he was included in their group of five. Did the others really need him? Wouldn’t they be able to relax and have a better time if he weren’t there? Maybe they just hadn’t realized it yet, and it was only a matter of time before they did? The more he pondered this dilemma, the less he understood. Trying to sort out his value to the group was like trying to weigh something that had no unit value. The needle on the scale wouldn’t settle on a number.But none of these concerns seemed to bother the other four. Tsukuru could see that they genuinely loved it when all five of them got together as a group. Like an equilateral pentagon, where all sides are the same length, their group’s formation had to be composed of five people exactly—any more or any less wouldn’t do. They believed that this was true. And naturally Tsukuru was happy, and proud, to be included as one indispensable side of the pentagon. He loved his four friends, loved the sense of belonging he felt when he was with them. Like a young tree absorbing nutrition from the soil, Tsukuru got the sustenance he needed as an adolescent from this group, using it as necessary food to grow, storing what was left as an emergency heat source inside him. Still, he had a constant, nagging fear that someday he would fall away from this intimate community, or be forced out and left on his own. Anxiety raised its head, like a jagged, ominous rock exposed by the receding tide, the fear that he would be separated from the group and end up entirely alone. Read more

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐“Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki” Haruki Murakami opens his latest novel with main character’s contemplation of suicide during his sophomore year in college. We soon learn that he suffered what we would call severe depression, although the novel doesn’t use those words. Instead of taking his own life Tsukuru Tazaki begins an examination as to what sent him “teetering over the precipice” at that point in his young life. Once again we are in Murakami territory – a landscape of loneliness and alienation that he has so ably depicted in many of his widely acclaimed books. Compared to some of his previous works, this is a very accessible and enjoyable read; the writing measured and precise. Murakami readers have come to expect other givens in his novels: his ineffable way with language, introspective characters, a certain claustrophobic atmosphere that wondrously opens up boundless insights into human feelings and emotions, and a disarming familiarity with the western literary canon, pop culture, and music, particularly jazz and classical masterpieces. His breadth of knowledge and interests seem boundless. In contrast, his latest fictional creation is as ordinary as they come, bereft of a “single quality … worth bragging about or showing off to others.” Tsukuru Tazaki’s main interest is train stations – designing, building and contemplating them – although he possesses an appreciation of music to add some color to an otherwise his drab life. (Liszt’s piano, Mal du Pays, which conjures nostalgia and melancholy, is a recurring motif in the novel.) Perhaps being such a blank page is what enables Tsukuru to see clearly – and cherish – the one truly wondrous, extraordinary thing which would inform in his life: his friendship with four other classmates – two boys and two girls – in high school in Nagoya. Unlike him, the four friends shared many things in common – family background, lifestyles, and names that all contained a color. It pains him that his last name does not have a color in its meaning, and that in itself made him feel as an outlier. He wonders why they accepted him at all. After high school all four remain in Nagoya for college, while Tsukuru moves to Tokyo drawn to an engineering professor, an expert on building railroad stations. In Tokyo he is friendless and lonely and finds his college mates ‘spiritless, dull and insipid.’ When he can, he takes the 1.5 hour bullet train to see his old friends in Nagoya but they never return the courtesy. They each pursue their own lives, and increasingly their reunion gets less and less frequent. Finally, in the summer of his sophomore year – like a bomb dropped on him – Tsukuru’s four friends inexplicably became unreachable. When his efforts to connect with them prove fruitless Tsukuru spirals into self-doubt, then depression, unable to sleep, eat, or do anything, losing weight, existing like a zombie. He has long, bizarre dreams full of graphic, erotic scenes. He makes a new friend, Haida, with whom he goes swimming and shares a love for Liszt’s piano suites known as Years of Pilgrimage. When Haida disappears from his life, Tsuruku is convinced he is fated to be alone. In short order, Tsukuru resigns himself to his lonely situation but finds a girlfriend, Sara, who works for a travel agency. She likes him enough to go to bed with him, maybe even marry him someday, but she senses that Tsukuru is carrying a baggage that interferes with their relationship. She prods him to confront his past. She arranges for him to meet his former friends and he takes time off to do that. But things do not improve, and Sara feels that seeing his friends in Nagoya after so many years may have been a bad idea, that instead of clearing up his confusion has shaken him up. “There’s still something stuck inside you,” she tells him, and she makes for him to go to Europe to talk with the other former friend, Kuro, who has moved and made a life in Finland, changing her name from Kuro to Eri. Murakami uses dialogue to great effect in these closing chapters set in Finland. Readers can skip long passages of background information – the book suffers a bit from repetition, but the conversation helps clear some things up for Tsukuru while creating and leaving some unanswered questions: why was he included in the group of classmates then cut off from them; what is Tsukuru’s future; will he and Sara marry and find lasting happiness; what is the truth behind the mysterious murder of Shiro, one of the group of five? Tsukuru has taken the journey to resolve his emotional scars; he has wallowed in self-examination, only to learn that there are no straight answers to our questions and confusions, regardless of how much we strive for explanations and rationality. In fiction as in life nothing is completely resolved. This is not to say Tsukuru has surrendered to despair. It is enough that once upon a time he belonged to a group of friends and there was harmony and joy among them. They believed in something “with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.”

⭐Sara’s ultimatum sets Tsukuru on his pilgrimage. The plot is a quest, that time-honoured structure familiar from Homer’s Odyssey. He must travel far and wide and overcome many obstacles in his search for the truth. It’s a form that Murakami used masterfully in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle in which the protagonist’s emotional trajectory—from sweetly inadequate to semi-mythic—resembles Frodo’s transformation in Tolkien’s epic Lord of The Rings.Tsukuru visits each of his former friends and talks to them face-to-face. He finds the boys still in Nagoya, and goes as far as Finland for one of the girls. When he finally learns the truth, it is disturbing. The fate of one of the five is as eerie, violent and sad as anything Murakami has ever written, although at a remove. We hear about it rather than witness it, a technique that keeps the attention squarely on Tsukuru.Colorless continues the author’s fascination with the permeable barrier between reality and imagination, in which temporality and states of consciousness merge and overlap. Tsukuru has erotic dreams involving Shiro (white) and Kuro (black): we wonder if they are unbidden aspects of his unconscious or whether they have more sinister portent.Murakami is extraordinarily attentive to the feelings of love and hate, injustice, jealousy and guilt that engulf Tsukuru. When a new friend, the handsome boy Haida (the name means “grey field”) appears in one of these sex dreams we know we are in a different reality. Haida’s story-within-a-story further confuses Tsukuru. Haida’s father is offered a “death token” that, among other things, heightens the ability to see colours. Is the story about Haida or his father? Is Haida even real?Murakami often pushes the outer limits of language, using music where words fail. In Colorless, the leitmotif is the beautiful Mal du Pays, one of three piano suites by Franz Liszt known collectively as Years of Pilgrimage. Mal du Pays translates as “homesickness” and it’s this mood of nostalgia and regret that permeates Colorless. It is as if Murakami had set out to translate the wordless, felt experience of music into prose.Murakami is not all ineffable atmosphere, however. There’s a satiric edge to the novel in the setting of the friends’ home in Nagoya, a city long derided as the industrial armpit of Japan, more often passed through than visited. These days Nagoya is climbing out of recession faster than almost any other city in Japan. Not for nothing does Ao sell Lexus cars, the luxury end of the Toyota range in this Detroit of Japan. In a sly note, Aka has become a life coach offering “personal development” to large corporations. His professional skill is to train employees to do what they’re told while still believing they are independent thinkers.Murakami likes to portray himself as the most ordinary of men with simple tastes: baseball, spaghetti, whisky. It’s a considerable achievement, given Colorless sold a million copies in a week on its release in Japan last year. He owned a Tokyo jazz bar for years, he has a huge record collection, he runs marathons. He refuses to cash in on his celebrity. His literary style is part of this ordinary persona. Despite the occasional fireworks, his writing is concentrated to the point of minimalism, a stripped-back style he shares with Raymond Chandler, whose work he has translated into Japanese (along with J.D. Salinger and F. Scott Fitzgerald).Greek mythology pops up unexpectedly, such as in Tsukuru’s Prometheus-like dream of being pecked by birds. (The entire plot of Kafka in the Shore is an elaborate reimagining of the myth of Oedipus.)If Murakami can be said to be a nihilist, it is in the way he taps archetypal fears. To be human is to be vulnerable and prey to unseen forces. Western readers can never really be sure how much of Murakami’s otherness is down to his Japanese-ness. John Updike once attempted to draw a line between Murakami and the eleventh-century Japanese classic the Tale of Genji. In trying to find an antecedent for Murakami’s metaphysics, he cites an episode where Lady Aoi’s suppressed emotions manifest as evil spirits. It’s a seductive theory, considering both Murakami’s grandfather and father were steeped in Japanese literature and trained as priests, but perhaps irrelevant to most readers.“We don’t understand him either,” says a young Japanese friend when I asked him about the influence of Buddhism and Shinto on Murakami. “We just think he’s weird.”Though more muted than previous work, Colorless rewards attentive rereading for emotional truths that belie its brevity and simplicity. Tsukuru’s “vocation”—designing railroad stations—is a case in point. Bullet trains are a triumph of modern Japan, symbols of order and timetabled reliability. But train stations are also redolent of departures and arrivals, missed connections and lonely commutes. As travellers we are sometimes comfortably seated when the train pulls out of the station. At other times we are left standing on the platform watching the back end shrink until it disappears into the darkness. Nonetheless, Murakami seems to be saying, the rails connect us all.

⭐Oh. Boy. I had to really give myself a little bit of time to breathe and control myself before reviewing this one, because my reaction to it was SO STRONG. On the one hand, that’s a good thing…right? On the other hand…no it wasn’t. It’s actually the second time in my life that I’ve broken my vows to the bookworm life and thrown an actual book across the room. But let me explain. To begin with? I was kind of into this book. It was a slow starter, took ages to get to any of the points that it wanted to make and was probably the most hipster thing I’d read in a long time. But that’s okay, I was in the mood for something a little deeper, full of symbolism, and possibly a teeny bit pretentious.Then came the middle, and my rating of this book soared. I was totally gripped! It got weird of course, which I understand to be a trait of Murakami’s. Sex dreams, paranormal stories, an obsession with stations and strange inner monologues all featured, but I was gripped by a need to get answers. The story has so many plot twists, and they all are designed to make the reader not only question themselves and life, but be invested in what had happened and would happen to the characters. I liked Tsukuru as a characters, elements of his life (his anxieties and depression especially) resonated with my own experiences and that made me care about him.And then…it ended. Or rather, it didn’t. Because after solving only one mystery, Murakami wasted his final chapters obsessing some more over Japanese stations, reflecting on Tsukuru’s watch and family, do some ‘deep thinking’ and then go to bed not answering a phone that KEPT RINGING. Who was on the other end? I don’t know. But what about Sara’s answer? *shrug*. Hang on, what happened to Shiro and Haida? NO IDEA. It left me feeling SO frustrated, and even a little cheated. I hate vague endings, but this didn’t even feel like an ending. I should never feel like I’m missing pages when reading a book. So why did I give this book a high-ish rating? Because it has been a while since I cared THAT much about ‘what happens at the end’. I can’t deny that I was hooked on this one, and the writing was good too. Murakami is certainly a master at what he does. I’m just not sure it’s to my personal taste.

⭐As a Murakami fan (In particular I love 1Q84, Kafka on the Shore and Hardboiled Wonderland), I was really looking forward to this. It was a major disappointment.A bit like a much lesser version of Norwegian Wood in style but the main character was insipid and the story was uninspiring and directionless. I did not like the ‘reason’ for the mystery that drove the story in the beginning and I began to become quite irritated by the ways in which women were being portrayed.There was so very little of the bizarre that Murakami does so well and without that, and with an absolute overload on the classic Murakami OTT descriptions of features it just really started to annoy me.

⭐…but achieves a really magical emotional depth. I had to come back to this review after reading others’ reviews. Clearly although a lot of us care a lot about Murakami, we differ a lot on what’s good and what’s not. I have to say that this one feels like a monster achievement. The magic realism is left behind, the story is all realism, yet the magic remains – and that’s amazing. The set-up is intriguing. Yet the real genius comes after the ‘reveal’ with the long, elegiac coda that is uncharacteristically emotional. As ever in Murakami there are people failing to communicate, failing to connect. For once he captures the tragedy of this truism. The ending, so criticised by many reviewers here, is, well … just perfect. I wonder if he’ll ever be able to do better than this. It’s wonderful. What a writer!

⭐Murakami has done it again with his bizarre yet wonderful narrative creations. This book, although seemingly quite plotless to begin with has in fact a rather deep meaning behind. As the you read on, an eerie atmosphere kind of grows throughout the novel as the truth and facts unravel in Tsukuru’s journey.I love this book as it makes you think afterwards and leaves you hollow, yet fulfilled. If you are a fan of Murakami, then definitely give this a try.

⭐Every year at Nobel prize time somebody says that Murakami ought to win so I thought I would try one of his higher rated novels. I wasn’t terribly impressed by this one. Of course things get lost in translation but I found it flat and unengaging. The protagonist is indeed ‘colorless’ which doesn’t help, but there are whole sections where nothing much happens. Partly because the book is set in Japan and has almost exclusively Japanese characters it just about held my interest throughout, but I expect to forget all about it in a week or so and wouldn’t hurry to read another Murakami.3.5

Keywords

Free Download Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in EPUB format
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage EPUB Free Download
Download Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 2015 EPUB Free
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage 2015 EPUB Free Download
Download Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage EPUB
Free Download Ebook Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage