About.com Rating
Knopf, 2014

One of the thrills of reading Haruki Murakami (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, 1Q84) is discovering the thematic viscosity between his volumes. While ruminations on jazz, talking animals, and perplexing, sentient technology seem to lurk a few pages ahead of every Murakami book, one can expect with certitude that each Murakami novel will attempt to grapple with the author's longstanding struggle of how to simultaneously express something and its absence.

Past novels have attempted this by way of parallel universes and a rigid dichotomy between two alternating protagonists and storylines?). In some novels, Murakami morphs two plots into one, while in others he leads his readers to mold together two characters into a single, complex psyche.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is Murakami's best attempt yet at reasoning with these themes. It is a novel executed with humility and maturity, and hopefully one that heralds a new direction for the author. The magical realism upon which the author once heavily leaned is gone in Colorless Tsukuru and it is astonishing to see what Murakami is capable of having bound himself to a more serious story. The work is an evolutionary triumph.

In his second year of college, Tsukuru Tazaki fell into a depression and was overwhelmed with thoughts of suicide. Having moved away from home to study engineering in Tokyo, he had hardly any friends at school and fewer at home. He was once a member of a friends-for-life quintet but was suddenly excised from the group by phone for reasons Tsukuru did not fully understand.

Part of Tsukuru had long expected some sort of dismissal: like the cast of Reservoir Dogs, his four friends each had a color in their surname, a coincidence that leant their camaraderie the illusion of some kind of cosmic alignment. "Colorless" Tsukuru often questioned his fit among their group, and something as trivial as their names led him to feel permanently superfluous. When his friend Ao tells him "not to call any of us anymore," Tsukuru doesn't question it; somehow the sad, self-effacing man inside him saw this fate coming.

Surprisingly, Murakami introduces present-day Tsukuru as a man in his late thirties. A younger Murakami would tell Tsukuru's story in the thick of his early-twenties malaise, but here we see him as an adult: he's fully-functional, professional and grown up. He dates occasionally, and when we first see Tsukuru he is on his third date with Sara, a businesswoman who cares enough about Tsukuru to motivate him to move beyond the emotional hang-ups of his youth. "You need to come face-to-face with the past," she tells him, "not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up independent professional. Not to see what you want to see, but what you must see."

The novel unfolds as one expects it to: Tsukuru must confront his four old friends to achieve the closure he needs. While the general arc of Tsukuru's pilgrimage is somewhat obvious, it's extraordinary to receive a straight explanation for the actions of Tsukuru's friends. They weren't replaced by hollow twins or abducted by cats or aliens: something very real and very troubling lurks at the center of the novel and it is one of the last things a Murakami fan would expect.

This reveal broadens the scope of Colorless Tsukuru but also grounds the novel's conflict into something psychological and human. Tethering the novel to reality allows Murakami to revisit his singular thesis in a far more productive and realized fashion. Colorless Tsukuru is not about evil twins or shadow worlds but something much more focused: the novel is about who a person is and how that person interprets that identity. The author explicitly dances around notions of becoming a new person: after Tsukuru's bout of depression, he feels reborn and is convinced he looks different: "the mirror no longer showed a soft, decent-looking, though unthreatening and unfocused boy's face... There was a new light in his eyes, a glint he'd never seen before, a lonely, isolated light with limited range." His thoughts often turn dark in the novel and at times sexually explicit and aggressive. Those shifts strike Tsukuru as perplexingly out of character, as if suddenly controlled by an entirely different person.

It's a familiar sentiment, and one that's been psychologically expounded upon by countless scholars. But in the case of Colorless Tsukuru, who are these two people? It's not quite Freud's id and ego; there is a temporality at play here, as Tsukuru seems to have lost his other self somewhere in his early twenties. Similar to the conjoining of two plots or two characters in early Murakami novels, Tsukuru must synchronize the adult he became with the adult he thought he'd become. As he reconnects with his old friends, Tsukuru learns that his self-image was dramatically different than how he was perceived by others: what begins as a pilgrimage of reconciliation becomes a story of self-discovery and redemption. Murakami refracts Tsukuru across a brilliantly realized spectrum into the most human and relatable character he's ever written.