tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage

Sixteen years later, an adult Tsukuru meets a woman named Sara. “Think about it,” he says, mysteriously, “and you’ll figure it out.” Confused and destroyed, Tsukuru falls into a deep pit of isolation, misery and existential confusion, a period from which he emerges reborn-not as a newly defined person but as an “empty vessel,” finally embodying the colorlessness of his name. Finally, Ao (Mister Blue) calls him and unceremoniously instructs Tsukuru to “not call any of us any more.” Tsukuru is understandably devastated, especially since Ao refuses to explain the group’s reasoning. One summer, when he’s visiting home from school, his friends ignore him, refusing to take his calls or even acknowledge him. “Did the others really need him?” he wonders.Īfter Tsukuru leaves Nagoya to attend college in Tokyo, he seems to receive an answer to that question. Everyone else seemed to have their own thing. But when he was young the name made him feel excluded from the group. Tsukuru, on the other hand, means “create” or “make,” a fitting name for a future engineer. He is “colorless” because, in high school, he was part of a close-knit group of friends, all of whom had colors in their names, rendering them Mister Red, Mister Blue, Miss White, and Miss Black. The titular protagonist, a train station engineer in Tokyo, lives a plain, solitary life. Murakami is still preoccupied with classical music, dreams, loneliness, and human connection. It is Murakami’s most emotionally earnest and straightforward work since Sputnik Sweetheart. Where 1Q84 focused on many lives full of strange mysteries, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki focuses on the strange mysteries of a single life.

Where 1Q84 was big and deliberately paced, bringing its two protagonists together slowly, over nearly 1,000 pages, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is brief, light on its feet and spare with descriptions. In the introduction to his short story collection Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman, Haruki Murakami writes, “To put it in the simplest possible terms, I find writing novels a challenge, writing short stories a joy.” After the epic 1Q84, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage must have felt like a joy.

Tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage