K-SCORE: 62
Author: Haruki Murakami
Spoiler Level: Major (but there's not much to spoil)
“I found myself feeling like what he had to say was so unequivocally right so often that he left an impact on my psyche even if his tale is the novel equivalent of a slow stroll through an industrial neighborhood on an overcast day.”
THE SCOTT 200
I have not read this book; I do however feel I am qualified to give my opinion. I’d describe Murakami’s writing this way. Say you’re knitting a scarf. At the beginning things are going well, you knit a few rows and it’s pretty clear what the scarf will one day look like. Then you get bored with one of the colors so you stop using that thread, then you add in a new color but only for half of the loops. Then one of the strands breaks, so you tie it back on with a big knot, but that throws off your scarf which is now too long on the right side. Instead of trying to fix your mistake you get bored (again), fling the rest of the wool out in a random pattern and declare, “I never wanted to make a scarf; this is art.” I give Colorless Somebody Something 30 out of 200 Murakamis. I give Kyle’s review 3 out of 5.
On the rare occasions that I read something written by a non-English speaker, something that has been translated by a third party, I try to mentally ward against two things: the cultural barrier and the lack of linguistic refinery. Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru, though, isn’t a struggle in either regard. The translation is simple, his writing eloquent if plain, and I found a great deal to relate to and understand in the modern lives of his characters. Tsukuru, every step of the way, felt like someone I could potentially know, even if I’ve never been to Japan. The prose, the concepts explored by the story, and the characters kept me turning the pages at a fairly rapid rate. That said, I didn’t like it all that much.
“reads more like the Tao Te Ching than it does like a moving modern story”
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is every bit as contemplative as a title like that suggests it would be. Murakami explores themes of loss, of friendships, of sexuality, of developing from adolescence into adulthood, of loneliness, of death, of feeling empty, of feeling simple, of feeling like you don’t belong, of trying to escape your life, and of creation both artistic and practical. That’s a beastly checklist of subject matter, and Murakami addresses them competently (with the possible exception of death), and therefore I can imagine many others would find a great deal to admire in Colorless Tsukuru. There’s bound to be some high concept buried in its fast four-hundred pages that you can cling to, that is particularly relevant to your life, and that you found well-phrased. For me, I could take or leave all the ancillary stuff. I was drawn in by Tsukuru coming to grips with the critical loss of his four friends, people he feels he had a connection with who decide one day they never want to speak to him again. They give no explanation. (My goofy friend Mikey would call it “ghosting”) The sudden absence of people that were once critical to your social life and day to day happiness, I think, is more common than most assume. It’s something I’ve experienced on a number of occasions and can definitely be crippling. The why of it, the irretrievable loss, the void that goes unfilled, can cause large amounts of damage to a person. So I was interested in Murakami’s novel right from the start and wanted Tsukuru to uncover all those mysteries and get through all that pain.
“Characters meet, they talk, they leave each other’s lives forever.”
“he’s a writer that seems frightened at the notion of falling firmly on the side of any issue”
Yet Tsukuru doesn’t develop enough for my taste. He changes after his friends leave him, and he’s aware of that. The problem is in coming to terms with who that somewhat new person is. His pilgrimage of understanding what happened to his former friendships should be more about accepting that which has been left behind permanently. This is something Murakami knows. Yet he’s a writer that seems frightened at the notion of falling firmly on the side of any issue (unless that issue is how good it feels to be touching “large full breasts.”) So he leaves Tsukuru in limbo. The man hasn’t pushed past his pain, though he has done a great deal of thinking about it and understanding his own life. Ultimately he throws himself into the hands of another person, praying that person doesn’t leave him for reasons he’ll struggle to understand in just the same manner that his friends did. Such a destination for Tsukuru is tragic, and makes this journey of a railway station designer feel like not a journey at all, but a lost soul sitting on a bench as people board and depart the trains of his life, wondering where he’ll end up.
Because I didn’t like the final place of the protagonist doesn’t make Colorless Tsukuru a bad novel though. It’s sad, certainly, and not as hopeful as I’d like, but there’s still a great deal to pillage from its pages. It’s the other problems that really weigh it down. Murakami has so many subjects, any one of which he feels are critical to understanding a human being, that everything has to be deeply philosophical, any moment world-rendingly important for the souls experiencing it, and any character jumping into the story does so at his or her most profound and eloquent. Ao, Aka, Kuru, Sara, and Haida are all every bit as well-spoken and driven by the desire to understand the deepest depths of human nature as Tsukuru is. They don’t blend when Murakami is describing them, but when they’re present in the novel, actually speaking with Tsukuru, then they’re a blur of personalities shoved into different circumstances. Perhaps what Murakami was going for was a protagonist, Tsukuru, who was the plain simple-minded, philosophically struggling one, yet the way it’s written with so many of the sentences taking place inside Tsukuru’s mind, that doesn’t come across at all. He’s the most complex, and he didn’t need to go on any kind of journey to internally debate those themes I mentioned. A boring but essentially the same version of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage features Tsukuru sitting in Shinjuku Station, thinking about the meaning behind his dreams where he has sex with Shiro and Kuru, thinking about why he likes watching Haida’s feet while swimming, thinking about if he’s just an empty vessel of a person for people to fill with whatever they like, thinking about why he’s fond of railway stations, thinking about colors, thinking about names, thinking about music and pottery, thinking about suicide. No action Tsukuru takes, with the possible exception of going so far out of his way (to Finland) to see Kuru, is critical to his growth as a person.
The proportions of description to actions to thoughts to dialogue are all out of whack in this novel. And the dialogue is always merely two characters discussing their deepest thoughts. And the description is almost always of character, trying immediately to bite at the being deep-down. If he’s not describing that, he’s describing clothing, or the feel of “large full breasts,” ideally being pressed up against them, maybe having them fill your hands. Murakami rarely describes setting, something common from writers that write about real places in the present time. The writer can see the place in his or her head because it’s an actual place he or she has visited. Why describe it? Just go to Tokyo. Just go to Nagoya. Just go to Helsinki. Obviously there is value in having even real places described by characters because what they observe about their world and how they see places is interesting. When Murakami does describe setting, he does so very well, but too often the reader is left wondering where exactly Tsukuru is and what it looks like while he’s doing all of this philosophizing. And action? Very little happens. Characters meet, they talk, they leave each other’s lives forever. Everyone is calm, moving at the same pace, going about everyday lives with thoughtful zeal or as miserable unfeeling husks. Not that I wanted sword fights and explosions, but a few potent moments of characters actually doing things would have done wonders to balance out the philosophy. Instead, Colorless Tsukuru reads more like the Tao Te Ching than it does like a moving modern story.
There’s definitely a big place in my head and a little place on my shelf for Murakami’s work though. I found myself feeling like what he had to say was so unequivocally right so often that he left an impact on my psyche even if his tale is the novel equivalent of a slow stroll through an industrial neighborhood on an overcast day. Twice he spouted wisdom on time-usage: once at the end when he considered the merit of so many Tokyo residents spending so many hours commuting each day, and once when he said that people who dwell on things for which they have absolutely no control end up very often wasting their time. Both were among my favorite bits of the whole text. And pondering the second made me feel that it isn’t that terrible how so much is left unfinished. Haida never returns and his disappearance is never explained, the mystery behind Shiro’s rape and the second mystery behind her murder years later is never explained, and the ultimate fate of Tsukuru is left in the balance. But so much of the story is about accepting that which you can’t fully know that it doesn’t bother me. In the end, Murakami accomplished the rare feat of creating a story that is better off as a compilation of fragments than a warmingly whole tale. It’s thoughtful and relevant, passive and sad. I’m glad that I read it, even if it’s too imbalanced to be as effective as it should be.