Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage marks a new direction in Murakami's fiction: a return to the lyrical realism not seen since his 1987 novel Norwegian Wood, but set against the social realities of contemporary Japan.
     Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage centers on a devastating emotional betrayal and its consequences. Tsukuru Tazaki belongs to a tight-knit group of five friends in high school--three boys and two girls who form a perfect circle they imagine will stay together forever. But when Tsukuru returns home from college in Tokyo, he finds himself inexplicably rebuffed by the group. Something has changed, but nobody, not even his closest friends, will tell him what.
     Years later, Tsukuru, now a successful engineer, begins dating an older woman named Sara and confesses to her the shadow this betrayal has cast over his life. Sara urges Tsukuru to try to find his old group and to try to solve the mystery that has haunted him all these years: why did they suddenly turn on him?
     On a quest to discover the truth, Tsukuru travels back to meet his old friends--with the exception of Shiro, the group's most volatile and psychologically unstable member, who he learns was strangled to death in an unsolved murder six years ago. As the dark truth about Shiro reveals itself, Tsukuru must confront the simmering emotional undercurrents that the group had suppressed in order to reach their ideal of perfect friendship.
     Can love overcome isolation? Is it possible to truly reach another person? Can buried emotions ever really stay buried? And will confronting the past allow Tsukuru to finally open himself up to the future?

"Murakami is a charming travel companion. Though we know where we're going, and must endure plenty of bumps in the road, the trip is rarely boring, his company is amiable, and we can rest assured that he will take us to strange places we've never been before, except perhaps in dreams. . . . [In Colorless Tsukuru] there is only a single moon in the Tokyo sky. Yet we're undeniably in Murakamiland. Nobody else could have written this novel, or dared to try. Then again, given the remarkable continuity of his fiction, nearly every Murakami novel feels like a new volume of the same meganovel, a vast saga that is now approaching 7,000 pages in length. . . . In Murakamiland, death means merely traveling across a 'threshold' between reality and some other world. It is not necessarily the end. In fact, as we soon learn, Tsukuru's obsession with death is only the beginning. . . . The mesmeric pull of Murakami's fiction lies in this tension between the narrator's perfectly ordinary existence and this shadow world, which might reside in our subconscious or even in an alternate universe, where we are free to enact our darkest, most violent, most perverse fantasies. . . . [He] writes genre fiction--formulaic, conventional, with an emphasis on plot. But it is a genre that he has invented himself, drawing elements from fantasy, noir, horror, sci-fi, and the genre we call 'literary fiction.' . . . The tone [in this new novel] is wistful, mysterious, winsome, disturbing, seductive. It is full of gorgeous, incongruous imagery. . . . Murakami is balletic, evoking metaphysical realms and a fine sense of the grotesque." --Nathaniel Rich, The Atlantic

"A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy--the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. . . . [Colorless Tsukuru] is a book for both the new and experienced reader. . . . The book reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation. A shedding of Murakami skin. It is not 'Blonde on Blonde, ' it is 'Blood on the Tracks.' . . . [The book's] realism is tinged with the parallel worlds of 1Q84, particularly through dreams. The novel contains a fragility that can be found in Kafka on the Shore, with its infinite regard for music. Hardly a soul writes of the listening and playing of music with such insight and tenderness." --Patti Smith, The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"[A] remarkable novel [that] takes us on a spellbinding descent through the rings of hell in Tsukuru Tazaki's young life. . . . A virtual symphony of literary and musical referents. Murakami's wizardry lies in his ability to pack all that cultural and spiritual resonance into a book that is as tightly wound as a Dashiell Hammett mystery. . . . Murakami can herd the troubles of a very large world and still mind a few precious details. He may be taking us deeper and deeper into a fractured modernity and its uneasy inhabitants, but he is ever alert to minds and hearts, to what it is, precisely, that they feel and see, and to humanity's abiding and indomitable spirit. . . . A deeply affecting novel, not only for the dark nooks and crannies it explores, but for the magic that seeps into its characters' subconsciouses, for the lengths to which they will go to protect or damage one another, for the brilliant characterizations it delivers along the way. . . . A page-turner with intervals of lapidary prose and dazzling human comprehension." --Marie Arana, The Washington Post

"Intoxicating. . . . It's hard to think of another writer who is as popular, as strange, and as lionized as Haruki Murakami is. . . . At first glance, you might think that Murakami has no overlap with that other writer whose work gets people lining up at midnight, J.K. Rowling. And yet they do have something in common. Both of them are comfortable creating their own specific and elaborate house blend of fantasy and reality. And as a result, they each shape a world that is recognizably their own. . . . The mystery of the spell that the great Murakami casts over his readers, myself included, [in Colorless Tsukuru] goes, as ever, unsolved. The novel feels like a riddle, a puzzle, or maybe, actually, more like a haiku: full of beauty, strangeness, and color, thousands of syllables long. . . . Weird and inviting." --Meg Wolitzer, NPR

"[Murakamai] has opened his vision, his sensibility, to reflect the distances implicit in being alive. . . . More than just a story but rather a meditation on everything the narrative provokes. How do we connect, or reconnect, to those around us but also to the very essence of ourselves? Where, in the flatness of contemporary society--which in this novel, as in so much of his work, Murakami evokes with a masterful understatement--do we find some point of intersection, some lasting depth? . . . There is a rawness, a vulnerability, to these characters, a sense that the surface of the world is thin, and the border between inner and outer life, between existence as we know it and something far more elusive, is easily effaced." --David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"Mesmerizing, immersive, hallucinogenic. . . . [Colorless Tsukuru] calls to mind Murakami's career-defining 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood." --Entertainment Weekly

"Bold and colorful threads of fiction blur smoothly together to form the muted white of an almost ordinary realism. Like J.M. Coetzee, Murakami smoothly interlaces allegorical meanings with everyday particulars of contemporary social reality. The shadows cast may be larger than life, but the figures themselves feel stirringly human. . . . This new novel chronicles a spiritual quest that might also be a love story. But here the author strips away the magical quavers of reality and the mind-bending plot structures that have become hallmarks of his work. . . . Readers find themselves propelled along by the ebb and flow of an internal logic that feels as much like a musical progression as it does an unfolding of events. The steady calm of the prose, the ambient rhythms of recurring motifs like Fraz Liszt's 'Le Mal du Pays, ' and the close attention to repetitive patterns in characters' lives bring readers into a carefully measured cadence like that of Tsukuru's pared-down lifestyle. . . . Thanks to Philip Gabriel's discerning translation into subtle yet artful language, the novel['s] . . . ease and obviousness convey an internal complexity that you 'get' without realizing it. . . . Tsukuru's situation will resonate with anyone who feels adrift in this age of Google and Facebook." --Christopher Weinberger, San Francisco Chronicle

"[A] feeling . . . lingered with me for days after I read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, a feeling of having experienced some extreme vividness, some extreme force of emotion. I'm still not sure exactly what it was. 'An encounter with genius' may be the answer . . . . Murakami is like Edward Hopper or Arvo Part, his simplicities earned, his exactingly artful techniques permitting him a higher kind of artlessness. . . . [Colorless Tsukuru is a] sincere, soft-spoken story. . . . There is an intoxicating mood of nostalgia. . . . Tsukuru's pilgrimage will never end, because he is moving constantly away from his destination, which is his old self. This is a narrow poignancy, but a powerful one, and Murakami is its master. Perhaps that's why he has come to speak not just for his thwarted nation, but for so many of us who love art--since it's only there, alas, in novels such as this one, that we're allowed to live twice." --Charles Finch, Chicago Tribune

"In Japan, and increasingly abroad, Murakami has become a publishing sensation. . . .Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is one of his most coherent [novels] and, in its tight and tidy way, one of the most satisfying. . . . The relative ordinariness of the plot notwithstanding, the story has pace and suspense. We want to find out what happened and what is going on in Tsukuru's head. Dreams figure prominently as the protagonist tramps through the Freudian undergrowth. . . . Murakami can find mystery in the mundane and conjure it in sparse, Raymond Carveresque prose. . . . Those who miss the goat-heads and the demons and the parallel worlds in which anything can happen shouldn't worry. There's enough unresolved human mystery in this novel to suggest that they'll be back." --David Pilling, Financial Times

"Hypnotic. . . . Colorless Tsukuru spins a weave of . . . vivid images around a great mystery. . . . In the past decade, James Wood has convincingly argued that what the novel does best is show us what consciousness feels like. Murakami, in his own oblique way, has sharpened that objective to a mystical cognitive science: This, so many of what of his books tell us, is what perception feels like. . . . [He] elegantly describes how emotional trauma can lead us to disassociate. . . . The story flows along smoothly, wrapping around details like objects in a stream." --John Freeman, The Boston Globe

"A reader opens a Murakami book with the expectation that anything can happen and that a story begun in realism will soon take off toward dreamlike realms. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki alights in some mysterious places but doesn't settle there. . . . [It] is replete with emotionally frank, philosophical discussions. It's a gentle ride, without the depictions of violence that sometimes occur in Murakami, and any traumas are recounted in retrospect, now covered with the tempering blanket of time. . . . Reflective." --Jenny Shank, The Dallas Morning News

"[Colorless Tsukuru is] beautiful, rich with moving images and lush yet exquisitely controlled language, reverberating, like that piano music Tsukuru cannot forget, with elusive emotion. . . . Murakami's last novel, 1Q84, was a gripping, complex, surrealistic thriller that weighed in at over 900 pages. This one is less than half that length, far more streamlined in structure and essentially realistic, but no less compelling. . . . Fans of elegant, intelligent fiction will welcome this book." --Colette Bancroft, Tampa Bay Times

"So taut and approachable--though it still retains [Murakami's] cool fabulism--that it may expand the Japanese lit icon's fan base even further." --Boris Kachka, Vulture

"Moving. . . . Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki may be Murakami's most human novel yet. . . . [When it] was released in his native country of Japan, it sold a million copies in its first week. That number is astronomical, especially here in the states, where Hillary Clinton's Hard Choices had a 'strong' opening week with only about 100,000 books sold. Calling Murakami a 'universally respected author' or even a 'paragon of literature' is no longer apt. The man is a cultural force unto himself. . . . [In Colorless Tsukuru] the staples of his work (stories within stories, sexual perversity, mysteries without real answers) all come together to form a beautiful whole. . . . It's quiet in the same way Marilynne Robinson's Gilead is, leaving the reader with that nostalgic feeling one gets when putting down a truly captivating story." -- Noah Cruickshank, A.V. Club

"Colorless Tsukuru had me hooked from the start. . . . A piercing and surprisingly compact story about friendship and loneliness. . . . Murakami skillfully explores the depths of Tsukuru's isolation and pain. His nervousness when he begins to suspect that friends have shunned him--and his anguish when it is confirmed--are chilling. No mysticism needed." --Jeremy Kohler, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Questions beget questions in this brilliant new novel by Haruki Murakami. . . . The premise is simple enough, but in the works of Murakami, nothing is simple. The endpapers for [Colorless Tsukuru] make this clear. A partial map of the huge, complex Tokyo subway system surrounds the text. Thousands of travelers pass through central stations on these heavily traveled lines. People intersect without ever meeting. Perfect for Tsukuru. . . . [It is] the gray area[s] Murakami explores so brilliantly. His characters' lives spin out in the shadow of accidents and natural disasters that have plagued Japan in the decades since Hiroshima. . . . Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki has a strong storyline and sharply drawn characters whose motives are ambiguous: a perfect introduction to Murakami's world, where questions of guilt and motivation abound, and the future is an open question." --Kit Reed, The Miami Herald

"Murakami has a knack for swift, seamless storytelling. . . . Don't be surprised if you devour Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage in the course of a night or two. Despite having an achromatic enigma as its protagonist, it's shockingly seductive. . . . A quietly thought-provoking book, but some of its most charming and unexpected moments come in nicely observed nuggets that seem to be far removed from the main narrative, at least at first glance." --Doug Childers, Richmond Times-Dispatch

"Accessible and often moving. . . . One of Murakami's most endearing and enduring traits as a writer is an almost reportorial attention to detail, the combined effect of which gives you a complete picture while still feeling a little ethereal. Because, like many of the award-winning novelist's best books, Colorless also is rooted in dreams.Tsukuru relates dark fantasies involving the people in his past in such a matter-of-fact way that the character himself isn't sure they're not real. As always with Murakami, it doesn't really matter if they are real: It's the feelings they evoke that matter." --Chris Foran, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"Spare and contained . . . so the few hints of emotional color stand out. . . . Because it's clear that Tsukuru's conscious and unconscious lives are almost totally separated, it's impossible to trust his memories or his interpretations of events. That gives the novel an unsettled, unresolved quality that continues to hum after its disquieting conclusion. . . . Like many of Murakami's books, this one has an implicit soundtrack. In this case, it's Liszt's suite for piano, Years of Pilgrimage, and particularly the 'Mal du Pays (Homesickness)' section of the suite. . . . Quiet, with disturbing depths." --Margaret Quamme, The Columbus Dispatch

"Murakami confronts big themes (friendship, forgiveness, the betrayal of loyalties) with a sombre eye. His gift as a novelist is to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. Colorless Tsukuru, a work of lapidary and suspenseful mystery, goes to the heart of questions about human solitude and yearning to connect. Admirers of Murakami's previous novels--Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle--will not be disappointed." --Ian Thomson, Evening Standard (London)

"Almost without precedent in modern...