books
Book review – Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki
Maybe “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” came at the right time.
Personally, its predecessor, "1Q84", was the weirdest 1184-pager to be published. It was a classic case of artistic freedom gone wrong, where abstract concepts and realism just collided to create a hot mess.
Haruki Murakami may be a Nobel hopeful, but if that was the metric to his “Nobel-ness”, then perhaps he should have taken a leaf out of his own book: “In a sense, I'm the one who ruined me: I did it myself.”
Thankfully he was not gunning for thickest tome in literary fiction. We have enough. Think: Stephen King's “The Stand” and Ayn Rand's “Atlas Shrugged”. So at 298 pages, his latest is palatable.
The novel talks about a 36-year-old Tsukuru Tazaki, an engineer who works on train stations, and his quest to find out just what happened between him and his circle of besties.
As a student he was in a quintet consisting of two girls and three boys. They did everything together, and their names corresponded to a colour, except Tsukuru, who was the "colourless" one.
His colourlessness, he believed, was evident in his character. He was the one that did not stand out. He thought of himself as boring and unattractive. Still, he found himself when he was with his companions. He was steady.
His world upended during his sophomore year when he gets a call from one of them, saying he has been expelled from the group. No reason was given, neither did he pursue an answer. And this is where the book begins: a lonely Tsukuru Tazaki contemplating suicide.
Tsukuru of course lives to tell the story and he does so to a certain Sara, a woman two years older than him, whom he has been seeing and is in an open relationship with. One night after sex, she tells him that she felt he was “somewhere else”, and vows to not sleep with him until he comes to terms with what is bugging him.
Sara is the other person whose name does not correspond to any colour, but is someone who is colour-coordinated in her dressing. She helps Tsukuru seek closure to that haunting event, and in the process, he goes on a journey that oscillates between past and present as he finally unravels all that led to his exile.
Now, fans will love “Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki”. It is vintage Murakami. It is loaded with sex, wet dreams, and bisexuality. There this mysterious element to the alleged offender which urges you to read on, something like “Norwegian Wood”, or Philip Roth’s “The Human Stain”.
And, you could say that this novel is a soundtrack of sorts. Again, vintage Murakami as we all know, knows his music – come on, he ran a jazz club. Franz Liszt's "Le mal du pays" is the book’s main score, as well as a list of references to pop music's greatest such as Pet Shop Boys and Barry Manilow.
Of course, any criticism about Murakami’s prose must take into consideration that this has come to us in English through Philip Gabriel. It is difficult to tell if every cliché or duff statement is courtesy of the author or the translator. But you can only wonder what went through Murakami’s mind when he described Tsukuru’s orgasm as “a huge wave crashing over him.”
“Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” by Haruki Murakami is published by Harvill Secker and priced at RM82.90. It is available in all major bookstores and in US and UK editions. – September 18, 2014.
Please note that you must sign up with disqus.com before commenting. And, please refrain from comments of a racist, sexist, personal, vulgar or derogatory nature and note that comments can be edited, rewritten for clarity or to avoid questionable issues. As comments are moderated, they may not appear immediately or even on the same day you posted them. We also reserve the right to delete off-topic comments