Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Relationships, in particular friendships within a group, are dissected here by Murakami. Our protagonist is a not so likable guy, a loner who works on his life-long obsession - train stations. We are shown his past life, the highlight of which was being with four friends from high school. Tazaki is the only one that does not have a color as part of his family name, presaging his being forced from the group while in college. The book follows Tazaki’s life through decades, until he is made to reconsider his ostracism decades later, meeting up with the old friends. The book makes you reflect on the differences between friendships in groups, friendship of two people, and dating relationships by describing Tazaki’s thoughts on what went wrong with many relationships and his investigation later in life. You end up liking him more at the end, realizing that he has grown in self-knowledge. I could identify with his situation. I would consider this a “guy’s book” in that if the story was written with a woman main character, the relationships would be much different, and the story wouldn’t have the same conclusions. Murakami’s prose again stands out to me as written by a reasoned, logical person with a poetic heart. He makes architecting and even waiting at train stations sound romantic. This is one of those books that I suspect I'll be thinking about for a long time. A bonus for me was the repeated discussion of a specific CD of Liszt’s music, which caused me to find and listen to the CD. Very nice, and it really does evoke the pace of the book, which was slow and deliberate. The audio version which I listened to also had one of the songs at the end.

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