Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the third novel I've read by Haruki Murakami, and the most straight-forward. It has relatively less magical realism than the other two books I've read, and an almost quotidian plot, but it is still a pretty good read, with some interesting commentary on the nature of friendship, love, and loneliness.

The lead character is a man in his thirties. He has realized his dream of becoming a designer of railroad stations. But he is not married and doesn't have much in the way of outside interests, except for swimming. He is in a relationship with a woman who suggests he deal with some baggage in his life: "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 explanation, not a word, for this harsh pronouncement."

His girlfriend, Sara, tracks down these four friends and urges Tsukuru to meet with them and find out why they dumped him. One of the friends is dead, and one lives in Finland, but he does meet with them and finds out why. Along the way he deals with the repercussions there action took on his life.

Murakami writes in a very matter-of-fact style (of course, this was translated from the Japanese) and at times the writing is as colorless as Tsukuru (he is colorless because his name, unlike his four friends, does not mean a color). There is only one flight of I recognize as Murakami's fancy, and that is a story told by a man who for a while befriends Tsukuru, involving a man who visits a spa and announces he is going to die soon. The rest is an almost itinerary-like description of his visits to his former friends. Oddly, this at times is quite compelling.

Occasionally, we get some figurative language that is stands out like, such as: "A distinct half moon hung above, like a battered piece of pumice stone that had been tossed by someone and gotten stuck in the sky," or: "The past became a long, razor-sharp skewer that stabbed right through his heart. Silent silver pain shot through him, transforming his spine to a pillar of ice. The pain remained, unabated."

As with 1Q84, which was a much more ambitious novel, Murakami makes allusions to classical music, this time Liszt's "Years of Pilgrimage--Switzerland," which one character played beautifully on the piano. There is also much discussion of the title character's career in making railroad stations--his name means, literally, someone who makes things, and we understand that without stations, there are nowhere for trains to stop. Many men of a certain age are fascinated by trains, but Tsukuru is interested in where they stop, which I'm sure is a metaphor for something, though I'm not quite sure what.

Of the three Murakami books I've read (1Q84 and Wild Sheep Chase are the others) this one is far less interesting, but it did have a strange hold on me. Maybe I was waiting for something that never quite happened.