Book #1: The Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami (298 pages)
Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning 'red pine', and Oumi, 'blue sea', while the girls' names were Shirane, 'white root', and Kurono, 'black field'. Tazaki was the only name with no colour in it.
One day, Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.
Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.
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Not sure where to start with this. This is the first I've read from Murakami, a name I often see in the context of potential nobel prize laureates. The prose is more simple and straight forward than I was expecting, and of course I'm a the mercy of a translator here, but apparently he's taken much more influence from western writers, even having translated books from English to Japanese and having his own writing criticised as "un-japanese".
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is an intimate story of one overly ordinary man's life with a tinge of weirdness spread throughout. Very much about the journey rather than the destination, as many of my favourite parts were seemingly inconsequential side-stories. My favourite part was a complete tangential story told to Tazaki, of a friend's father who in his youth befriends an ailing pianist with an odd power. There's a very slight sense of magical realism but the book's world never enforces it outside of the character's minds. I can't tell if it's Murakami's style or Tsukuru's slightly unhinged mind, but for such a plain, ordinary person he thinks in some hella weird ways and paves the way for some trippy ideas. Like believing a particularly weird nightmare could manifest in reality, and retroactively cause him to do something in the past. Being written in third person makes it hard to gauge moments like that, if it's the whole fictional world that's weird or just Tsukuru.
The title refers both to Tazaki's years of isolation and more literally to a record he owns of Franz Liszt's Years of Pilgrimage. It's the only record he owns and was left behind by another friend, Haida (whose name contains the colour grey). Specifically the piece "le mal du pays" played by Lazar Berman comes up several times and in Tazaki's mind it serves a connection between important people and disparate parts of his life. The emphasis on music gave a really cozy, tangible atmosphere in some scenes (I guess it helps that I had to put on every track as it was mentioned). Another moment has a piano solo of Thelonuious Monk's Round Midnight - "His playing was so soulful it made Haida forget about the piano's erratic tuning. As he listened to the music in this junior music room deep in the mountains, as the sole audience for the performance, Haida felt all that was unclean inside him washed away"
The early chapters describing Tazaki's depression had me hooked - "It was as if he were sleepwalking through life, as if he had already died but not yet noticed it... and after school, when 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". Once we're caught up to the present the rest of the book has Tazaki tracking down each of his old friends. This part has an excellent sense of forward momentum, and each one feels rewarding even for different reasons.
It's not without issue, though. Particularly the character of Sara, I found her chapters the hardest to get through. She's sort of a weak plot device, in that after so many years its her 'intuition' and insistence on arbitrary conclusions that sets Tsukuru in motion. It doesn't help that she's only described in terms of sex appeal and doesn't contribute much beyond forcing the plot into gear, and for me that left the end feeling a bit cold too. Their suddenly stagnant relationship is what spurs Tsukuru toward uncovering his past and getting back on track with her serves as his reward, like a feminine carrot on a stick.
The idea of 'Colourless Tazaki' not being so colourless after all is undermined somewhat with this fixation on Sara and her apparent control over him, rather than seeking resolution for his own catharsis and well-being, as that seems more than valuable enough to be its own reward, and one scene in particular seems there only to muddle Tazaki's growth further. It's somewhat frustrating as I feel the whole novel would have been more worthwhile had Tazaki moved forward of his own accord, removing Sara altogether, or failing that by expanding her into a character who isn't completely uninteresting. I wont make assumptions on Murakami's ability to write women based on just this one but it's certainly not a good example.
In the end while the blurb mystery does get resolved, much of the book is left unanswered, being left to the reader as to whether nightmares may infect reality, if someone's name and 'colour' has a special precedence in defining one's life, or if a weird ass pianist was actually carrying an amputated sixth finger in a little pouch (did I not mention that bit?). More than that it's a meditation on how much can get lost in the aggressive flow of time, and what can be held in spite of it. To that end I would say it falters a bit, but isn't unsuccessful.
“You can hide memories, but you can't erase the history that produced them.”
tl;dr; a weird book, uneven, questionable female characters, good use of music, cozy scenes, memorable and good overall but there's a few nails your enjoyment could get snagged on. Also very weird sex, don't think I mentioned that.
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Man, this took me a while, didn't it? I'll be tearing through some <200 page books next just to get my number up. This review took a lot longer than I expected as well.
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