murakami haruki and our years of pilgrimage

It's only later in life that we develop the capacity to understand who we were and are, and even then, that understanding comes only with struggle and pain. It's in this way that Murakami, perennially mentioned as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature, captures something fundamental about being human: the fact that, as our personalities are still forming, our self-knowledge is inchoate at best. It must suffice to say that Tsukuru, who has always thought of himself as a human cypher, 'an empty vessel,' did not appear that way to his friends, among whom he had been the unwitting focus of a web of emotional entanglements that he barely knew existed. To explain more about that would require a series of spoilers. Tsukuru's journey into the past - which takes him to his hometown of Nagoya, where two of his old friends still live, and later to Finland, where another of his friends has moved with her husband - provides him with the keys he needs to understand why they dumped him so unceremoniously all those years ago. 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. Neither does his romantic connection with a slightly older woman named Sara, whose function in the story is to prod Tsukuru to begin the obviously necessary process of healing himself by discovering what really happened 15 years earlier. One of these involves Haida, a young university student to whom Tsukuru develops a strong (and possibly homoerotic) attachment, but it goes nowhere definite. Like a sloppy weaver, Murakami measures out several plot threads only to leave them coyly dangling. (For a railway engineer with a concrete, 'straightforward' personality, as he describes himself, Tsukuru engages in an extraordinary number of philosophical and metaphysical speculations, most of which obscure rather than reveal the story's primary arc.)

Its promising plot - which centers on the title character, a Tokyo man in his mid-30s still nursing the psychic wound of having been mysteriously expelled from his tight circle of friends from high school - is repeatedly interrupted by lengthy and inconsequential episodes that stop the book's narrative momentum in its tracks. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the oddly formed yet absorbing new novel by the celebrated Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, is one of those books that manages to succeed in spite of itself.īy most standards of traditionally wrought contemporary fiction,Ĭolorless Tsukuru, which reads like an excellent short story padded to the more commercially viable length of a novel, ought not to work at all.

Murakami haruki and our years of pilgrimage