...in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the Kafkaesque spectre in the text is The Trial ... The majority of the narrative involves the protagonist's quest – which takes him as far as Finland – to understand the reason for his ostracism ... A reader without Japanese is completely at the mercy of Murakami's translators; when the prose lowers to cliche or commonplace – as it seems to do surprisingly often in this novel... Although as adept as ever at setting up Kafkaesque ambiguity and atmosphere, he disappointingly chooses to leave most of the mysteries unresolved.
Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage begins with a simple premise: A Tokyo railroad engineer, the Tsukuru Tazaki of the novel's title, unable to get over the summer of his sophomore year in college, when for no reason he can determine he was cut off by his close-knit group of high school friends ...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 ...a novel less of wandering than of integration, although what this means is difficult to pin down. Does Tsukuru come to any kind of closure? The answer is: Yes and no. The past, even revisited, can never be reclaimed.
...what intrigued me about his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is that it's explicitly about that blankness. He cops to the emptiness of his hero right up front... By delving into the past, Tsukuru delves into his own blankness to see how deep it goes, what it means and what it might be concealing ... Tsukuru does find out why his friends turned on him, but I won't spoil it. The question is whether in the process he becomes a whole person. Murakami tells us he does — but I'm not convinced. Tsukuru excavates a mountain of drama and backstory out of his blankness, but he still stares at it just as blankly.
Just the title alone sounds Murakami-like — weird and inviting. Tsukuru has 'no deep interest in the arts, no hobby or special skill ... he blushed easily, wasn't especially outgoing, and could never relax around people he'd just met.' ... There's such a modest, reluctant quality to this character, a drifting uncertainty that is both infuriating and identifiably human. Why Tsukuru's friends dropped him is the central mystery driving this novel ... Over the course of the pilgrimage there are moments of gorgeous, contemplative prose ... Still, the simplicity and depth of Murakami's work give it its irresistible quality ... Colorless Tsukuru's mystery is solved before the end, but the mystery of the spell that the great Murakami casts over his readers, myself included, 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.
...Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is brief, light on its feet and spare with descriptions. Where 1Q84 focused on many lives full of strange mysteries, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki focuses on the strange mysteries of a single life ...the division exists within a single character: on one side, Tsukuru’s investigation into his past; on the other, his dream life and his haunted feeling that those very dreams may have more dire consequences than he imagined ... He was more interested in leading Tsukuru to his own gentle epiphany—that he isn’t, after all, colorless. The novel ends ambiguously, but things are looking okay for Tsukuru ... The world of this novel, it turns out, does reflect reality— inadvertently or not, it is patriarchy in distilled form. A mostly bland male lives a mostly bland life.
...it is that midway through his latest, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, a man who appears to be a soulless con artist surprises us with a bit of workaday wisdom ... Like its predecessors, Colorless Tsukuru is pleasingly off-kilter and a bit otherworldly, even as it tells a story rooted in the here and now ...there's a hint of the bizarre in this otherwise earthbound tale — notably, an unsettling story-within-a-story about a foretold death ... Off-the-cuff philosophical musings; a brand of foreshadowing that suggests an adult fairy tale; a melancholy fascination with youthful relationships gone wrong; narrative playfulness... isn't the 65-year-old Murakami's most daring work.
The 'pilgrimage' of Haruki Murakami's latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, translates literally as a 'reverent perambulation' ... The pilgrimage makes a fine metaphor for its hero's journey, but perhaps an even better one for the author's ... He offers instead a down-to-earth examination of isolation and intimacy so elementary that it feels more like minimalist art than the complex, wind-up creations he usually produces ... In this book, spiritual and interpersonal work requires physical effort, beginning with seemingly small behaviors that create new pathways of thinking and relating ... 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 ...in this work these bold and colorful threads of fiction blur smoothly together to form the muted white of an almost ordinary realism.
The book's plot is simple. Tsukuru, its title character, is a designer of train stations, successful but with a strong sense of disconnection from his self — a powerful feeling of absence, or colorlessness ... Murakami's books may move within the banal dream of adult life, but their homeward pull is toward youth ... As Tsukuru tracks down his friends, this enables the author to ask very basic questions with new freshness: What makes a person? What was the past? And where did it go? ... 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.
In contrast, Colorless Tsukuru is a relatively slim and quiet volume. Some might say that it recalls Murakami’s earlier forays into realist fiction, although it’s not quite that either. The book showcases Murakami’s later talents as both a deeply intuitive and effortlessly inventive writer ...begins Tsukuru’s pilgrimage, a physical and emotional journey that sends him into the past, and as far away as Finland, on a quest to find answers and secure the love of a woman ...this book is centered on a mystery and it should be said that readers who read for answers, who chew through pages to get to the hard nut why, may find this book frustrating ... Colorless Tsukuru serves as an access point, a station that transports readers and connects them with Murakami’s previous works.
...Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is considerably flawed, even when judged within the strange and disjointed context of the author’s previous work ... There is something relentlessly compelling about following a sympathetic character on a journey to find the missing pieces to the jigsaw puzzle du jour, whether those pieces are lost relatives, unuttered truths, or, I don’t know, horcruxes ... All of the hallmarks of Murakami’s style... all are present in Colorless Tsukuru, but for perhaps the first time in his work, they seem flat and uninteresting, almost overused, as if the novel is a parody of his earlier work ... It is hard to sympathize with a character like Tsukuru, who seems to have arisen out of a writing prompt that challenges the writer to create someone with no personality at all ...is aloof, quiet, and finally, dissonant.
Moving away from the magical realism of many of his recent novels, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage recalls some of the elements of Norwegian Wood. Its title character, at age 36, looks back on his youth and painful events that changed his life forever... Tsukuru's pilgrimage will lead to a shocking revelation, one that only becomes more dismaying as each person adds details to its recounting ... Dreams, too, play an important role — erotic dreams, frightening dreams, frightening erotic dreams — and those dreams sometimes leak into Tsukuru's waking life ... Full of melancholy and loss, it is nonetheless beautiful, rich with moving images and lush yet exquisitely controlled language, reverberating, like that piano music Tsukuru cannot forget, with elusive emotion.
Questions beget questions in this brilliant new novel by Haruki Murakami ... As narrator, Murakami travels effortlessly through time and space and takes the reader with him ... Powerful, disturbing dreams suggest he may be at fault ... We are in the gray area between imagination and physical reality, where the trains run on time, but everything else is up for grabs ... Much more accessible than IQ84 and, for that matter, most Murakami titles, 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.
... Haruki Murakami's accessible and often moving new novel, underscores that difference, and the personal journey necessary to bridge that gap ... As is often the case in Murakami's fiction, his characters are all about introspection — think Ted Mosby in TV's How I Met Your Mother or Woody Allen...tone is often neutral, if deceptively so ... 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.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki alights in some mysterious places but doesn’t settle there. It’s more straightforward than Murakami’s most recent works of fiction...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...the plot of the novel is essentially Tsukuru’s investigation into his own groundless sadness, which turns out to be not so inexplicable after all ... Murakami doesn’t tie up every loose end in this quiet, reflective novel, but he does enough to satisfy.
Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki features an erotic dream sequence that blurs the boundaries with real life, and a strange, allegorical story about a virtuosic jazz pianist playing his last tune. Other than that, though, the events in the book are, in very un-Murakami-like fashion, pretty much as they appear ... One of the most powerful things about his fiction is the way he depicts life in an elemental way – as an epic, if personal, quest, to resolve universal issues of memory, childhood, and human connection. To see him covering the much less grand terrain of near middle age is startling... In Murakami’s hands this is usually a powerful approach ...overall the novel shows the limitations of Murakami’s style at its extremes. His best writing settles over you like fog, but Colorless Tsukuru is so indeterminate, so light of being, that it ends up feeling like there isn’t much there at all.
...Murakami's new novel provides an intriguing and compelling inquiry into the impact of the fantastic and the unreal on the real lives of those caught up in its mysteries ... Tsukuru Tazaki, 36, an engineer by training, works on the design and construction of rail stations throughout Tokyo. But 16 years previously, he had been summarily ousted from a close-knit group of five high school friends. This dismissal haunts him, despite attempts to conceal its effect, even now ... What Tsukuru discovers is that 'the truth of the matter' remains elusive and contradictory, that inference and supposition and expectations carry much more weight in how one constructs memory than one might expect ...for the reader, at least, the pilgrimage has been well worth the undertaking, an apt, in-depth illustration of the impact memory, however imperfect, has on the present.
By most standards of traditionally wrought contemporary fiction, Colorless Tsukuru, which reads like an excellent short story padded to the more commercially viable length of a novel, ought not to work at all ...is repeatedly interrupted by lengthy and inconsequential episodes that stop the book's narrative momentum in its tracks ... Like a sloppy weaver, Murakami measures out several plot threads only to leave them coyly dangling ... That process, fortunately, holds this messy novel together in a way that will keep most readers turning the pages despite occasional stretches of impatient boredom ... a series of disillusionments that lead not to a physical place but to one of emotional and perhaps spiritual enlightenment. What's buried, Tsukuru learns, must be unearthed and confronted; otherwise it haunts us forever.
...readers will recognize familiar themes: a young protagonist befuddled by outside forces; dreamlike meditations on alienation; and a conversational, deceptively simple writing style ...his banishment has perplexed him for 16 years. Sara suggests that Tsukuru track down his old friends and find out what happened. Much of the narrative depicts Tsukuru’s investigations as he learns the group members’ reasons for his swift rejection ... His prose style is chatty and straightforward, with a lot of stage direction and lengthy conversations. The philosophical heft of his themes makes this technique work ... Each of the five friends has had a heartbreaking transition from adolescence to adulthood, and Murakami beautifully dramatizes their challenges and tragedies.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki’s release was an event in Japan, which is fitting, since the novel is Murakami’s best work in two decades ... Content to drift through life, thirtysomething Tsukuru Tazaki lives in Tokyo with no purpose beyond his job of designing train stations. When a new girlfriend, Sara, probes him about the past, he begins to reexamine his life ... In typical Murakami fashion, the exploration of the past is both physical and spiritual, with Tsukuru flying across the world as well as re-inhabiting old fantasies that hold peculiar powers ...strongly makes the case that the enigmas Murakami presents are not what’s interesting about his stories. He has a hyperactive imagination, bending and warping narratives that otherwise feel very human ...may be Murakami’s most human novel yet. Most scenes are dialogues between characters, with the major plot points turning on what long-lost friends have to say, rather than great shifts in the universe.
Murakami (IQ84, 2011, etc.) turns in a trademark story that blends the commonplace with the nightmarish in a Japan full of hollow men ... Fast-forward two decades, and Tsukuru, true to both his name and his one great passion in life, designs train stations. He’s still wounded by the banishment, still mystified at his friends’ behavior. Helpfully, his girlfriend suggests that he make contact with the foursome to find out what he’d done and why he’d deserved their silence. Naturally, this being a Murakami story, the possibilities are hallucinogenic, Kafkaesque, and otherwise unsettling and ominous... Murakami writes with the same murky sense of time that characterized 1Q84, but this book, short and haunting, is really of a piece with older work such as Norwegian Wood and, yes, Kafka on the Shore.
...a return to the mood and subject matter of the acclaimed writer’s earlier work. Living a simple, quotidian life as a train station engineer, Tsukuru is compelled to reexamine his past after a girlfriend suggests he reconnect with a group of friends from high school ... Feeling his life will only progress if he can tie up those emotional loose ends, Tsukuru journeys through Japan and into Europe to meet with the members of the group and unravel what really happened...result is a vintage Murakami struggle of coming to terms with buried emotions and missed opportunities, in which intentions and pent up desires can seemingly transcend time and space to bring both solace and desolation.
