An instant #1 New York Times BestsellerOne of the most revered voices in literature today gives us a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the remarkable story of a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is … around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present.
A New York Times and Washington Post notable book, and one of the Financial Times, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Slate, Mother Jones, The Daily Beast, and BookPage’s best books of the year
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The simplicity and depth of Murakami’s work give it its irresistible quality… In this book, Murakami provides a dose of his brand of originality, made up of sex, music, ghosts, auras, alienation, and a yearning for connection… 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.
This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it… 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.
Murakami is a master, well deserving of the international acclaim he receives. Like all of his works, he creates alternate universes and lets the reader slip, almost without noticing it, from one to the other. I often purchase his books as soon as they become available and they never disappoint.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is thoughtfully crafted with character’s names and plot. Tsukuru means make, create, or build in Japanese, so he ends up with building the train stations. He continues to refer himself as he is colorless compare to his high school friends who have colors in their names and his mind is firmly framed as if he must act like colorless, not standing out. Since his high school group abandoned him, Tsukuru avoids to get close to anyone anymore because he doesn’t want to get hurt anymore. Two female friends in the group, Kuro (black) and Shiro (white), appear in his dreams often, then, his only college friend, Haida (grey) uniquely blends into Tsukuru’s fantasy. 16 years later, he meets Sara. With Sara’s encouragement, he starts to untangle his haunted past by visiting each friend who were in the close group. And that is the most important turning point for Tsukuru to open up and be truthful to himself in order to connect someone who is important in his life.
I love reading any thing Murakami writes
This book was a mystery without the blood I’m used to and add a literary bent of lovely imagery and simplicity of writing that I loved. The main character is so confused and lost, it made him very relatable and sad.
Interesting characters but left me wanting more in the end.
This is a memorable book for me. I enjoyed getting into the character of colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. Masterful writing, I highly recommend this book.
Not my taste. Very symbolic rather than realistic (my preference).
Enjoyed exploring in the internal world of Tsukuru.
A good book
Young Tsukuru is cut off by his close friends and spends years before discovering why – meh
As always, Murikami delivers with a wonderfully written and smart book. Great characters, intriguing story. One his most accessible books still filled with wit, mystery and such intelligent thinking as to startle. Excellent translation.
Love this author!
Interesting characters and how they handled a tragic situation.
This is a very cerebral novel with most of it taking place in the protagonist’s mind. Wonderful insightful writing.
Reading through Haruki Murakami’s catalog, I’ve run into a few hiccups. The first is outside Murakami himself: his translations range in quality. As he’s become more popular in the west, his translations do a better job of capturing his tone. The second is his natural progression was a writer. He tells stories that can sometimes feel similar, but his writing skills have improved since he began writing decades ago.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a good starting place because it’s one of his most recent novels, and it has a solid translation. If you want to know what a Murakami novel is like, this is a good indication. It’s worth reading. If you don’t like this one, you may not like his style. My only caveat to that assessment is that the strange elements are downplayed in this one versus Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore.
Great story-telling from an Eastern point of view.
Anyone who has ever lost a friend and not known why can relate to Tsukuru Tazaki. The defining experience of his life is that at age 20 his four best friends, the people he considered an extension of himself, cut him off without explanation. Sixteen years later, their treatment of him still stings – it is the reason, Tsukuru believes, that he always keeps a distance between himself and others, that any future rejection will not cut so deeply. Spurred by a new girlfriend, Tsukuru strives to make peace with his past by visiting – unannounced and one-by-one – each of his former friends.
I have mixed feeling about this book. On the one hand, I read it in about two days, so I was obviously hooked. But I still can’t figure out why. Tsukuru is not a particularly likeable character and the pages are often filled with minute details on nothing (this is a character whose single hobby is watching trains arrive and depart from Tokyo train stations). I also found the ending a bit maddening – perhaps the author was tired of his story and simply wanted to finish?
I have read other review that say, essentially, if you’ve read one Haruki Murakami, you’ve read them all. I can’t say; Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is my first. What I can say is that the book is infused with a sense of “Japanese-ness.” That is, the entire essence of the book is Japanese which is, I believe, what ultimately kept me reading and why in the end I still liked it.
(This review was originally published at https://www.thisyearinbooks.com/2014/10/colorless-tsukuru-tazaki-and-his-years.html)
This is a terrific novel, in which the author’s clinical tone—colorless, if you will—works to the strengths of the book, chronicling a young man sorting through old friends and old mistakes, the hopes of finally feeling his life take hold. Though the structure is nearly episodic, and the hero’s adventures are a familiar mix of the comic, the horrific and the just plain odd, the book has a clear and melancholy thread: Life is bewildering, and we must choose to cherish and to ignore the incidents that we decide fit best, or not at all, in our ideas of ourselves, like plucking out a tune on the piano.