Other-worldly reading: “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami

Murakami is becoming a global brand. There are outward signs of this even as you pick up the book in a store. First, he no longer has any need of a first name, at least not for the purposes of the cover. Second, the edges of the pages of my paperback edition were coloured black, as if a child had taken a marker pen and run it over the sides of the pages, held tightly together. The effect is both rather gimmicky and surprisingly strange (also slightly off-beam, as black is very much a colour in this book). Add to these physical characteristics of my edition the Murakami-mania which attended the publication of this book in Japan - midnight queues outside bookshops, a million sold in the first week - and you start to get the vibe: we are in literary superstar territory here.

The question for the Murakami reader is whether the contents of these books is also somehow becoming branded. Certainly here we are in very familiar Murakami territory, the quest of a lonely, somewhat alienated protagonist struggling to (re)capture meaning and connections in life, while haunted by some traumatic personal event which desperately needs, yet seems to defy, explanation. There is undoubtedly a sense of having been here before, and though I devoured this book as eagerly as I have previous Murakami novels (helpfully, he is as keen on plot as on metaphysics), the sense of déjà vu was distinctly there, to the extent that I started to anticipate certain outcomes - though it was refreshing to find that I was generally wrong.
Many writers write nearly the same book over and over. I have a great deal of sympathy with this. Another example, also one of my favourite writers, is Paul Auster. The risk, as it was for a spell with Auster, is that the books become just variants on a theme, slaves to the underlying idea rather than adding nuance to it, and being allowed to take on lives of their own.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage does not fall into this trap - quite. For all that it serves up familiar preoccupations, they way they play out does not become codified or predictable. There is a mystery here, and though, typically, it is not fully resolved, what we do discover is not pat or easy. Other familiar elements in Murakami - the significance of classical music (especially here Liszt's Le Mal du Pays), the pop culture references, swimming, the contemporary Japanese environment, the sudden foreign trip - are also all there, but support the story effectively rather than somehow just ticking boxes.

So what of the story? Tsukuru is a young engineer living in Tokyo, making a living designing and building railway stations, working in a field which has always been a passionate interest for him. However, he feels unfulfilled and somehow floats over the surface of life, considering himself without personality or interest for others. We learn that he dates this condition back to the trauma of his unexpected and sudden exclusion from what had been a "perfect" tight-knit group of five friends back in his home town during his late adolescence. He does not have any explanation why, on a visit home, his friends suddenly no longer wanted to see him, but in his mind he connects the decision to the fact that while his friends, two boys and two girls, all bore names containing the notion of colour, red, blue, black and white, his own name had no colour, rather just a somewhat artisan redolence of the verb "to make".

In spite of the trauma of exclusion, and having overcome a nihilist-depressed phase which brought him to the edges of death, Tsukuru concludes his studies and embarks on an outwardly modestly successful life working for the rail company. A close friendship with a more junior male student, Haida (name colour: grey), helps him overcome his initial crisis, though curiously Haida also ultimately unaccountably deserts him. Otherwise, Tsukuru's life is uneventful, rather lonely, punctuated by occasional superficial relationships with girlfriends. 

What breaks this pattern is a new girlfriend, Sara. Her name has no colour associations, but her sense of colour in the way she dresses is frequently referred to. The couple realise that there is something blocking their relationship, and it is Sara who insists that he seek explanations for the decisive rupture in his life, the importance of which she understands, after he, for the first time, has related it to her. Whence the quest, which takes him not only to his home town, but as far as Finland, to find out what went wrong. Answers are found, though they are never quite complete.

The global brand

Murakami books seem to fall into two broad categories: those which tell tales of self exploration in the recognisably real world (prime example, Norwegian Wood), and those which veer into the supernatural or metaphysical (e.g. The Wind-up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore). This novel falls basically into the first category, though it constantly hints that it might go further. I mentioned my confounded expectations: I did at several points expect the plot to tip over into a kind of magical realism, but - unless I'm missing something - it never quite got there. Instead, many "events" in this book transpire in what seem to be dream sequences, with erotic dreams about the two female members of the original group of five being a crucial, retrospectively guilt-inducing, example of these, as well as a second-hand story related by Haida, which we don't know whether or not to believe, but which posits some ideas about colours and their meaning which provoke the most otherworldly episode in this book.

So do I suggest you read this book? Murakami veterans - who like Murakami - will enjoy it, though there is, as I say a certain familiarity about it. It is in any case a quick and enjoyable read. I actually think however that this might not be a bad place for a Murakami newcomer to start, especially for those who do not want to commit at the outset to talking on what I still consider his masterpiece, the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which is long and heavily tinged with the metaphysical. Whatever, Colorless Tsukuru is on-form Murakami, there's no doubt about it.