Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage: Starter Murakami

If you've never read Haruki Murakami and always wanted to, his bafflingly titled new novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a great way to wade into his work. That's because, it's a pretty straightforward story on the surface — a 36-year-old engineer living in Tokyo named Tsukuru Tazaki is trying to find out why, when he was in high school, his four best friends suddenly broke off all contact with him, refusing to even give him an explanation for why they'd never talk to him again.

But the novel also includes some of the weird, wild hallmarks of Murakami-ism — there are some strange, often sexually-tinged dreams, a long tangent (or is it?) about a dying guy who sees people's "colors" and only people of one color (nothing to do with race) can save him, and constant questioning of the line between what's real and what's imagined and what's part of this world and what's not.

Tsukuru Tazaki, for all his self-perceived colorlessness, is still a fascinating character. But he doesn't think so — he has a small-minded view of himself, thinking of himself as boring and plain (he's the only one of the group of five friends who doesn't have a name evoking a color), and he's constantly telling people how boring he thinks he is, including his new ladyfriend Sara. But it's Sara who convinces him he needs to dredge up his past and go on his mini-vision quest to find out why his tightly knit group of high school friends suddenly stopped talking to him — an event which sent poor Tsukuru Tazaki into a near death-spiral of depression.

So Tsukuru goes back to his hometown Nagoya and then to Helsinki, Finland, to find the truth. Unlike some other Murakami novels, there is an actual, specific answer to his question about why he was suddenly treated as persona non grata. And it's shocking and sad, and brings up even more questions for poor Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.

Whenever I'm reading Murakami, I'm always in awe of how his prose alternates between sentences that are so clunky and mundane and passages that are amazingly profound and insightful — my favorite of which is this, and which is kind of the main theme of the novel:

In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood. One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony."

Not exactly a sunny outlook life, is it? Still, when I'm reading Murakami, I'm convinced he employs some weird sorcery (like something in his novels) to make the pages just fly by. I don't know how he does it. This isn't my favorite Murakami of all time (that's a distinction Kafka On The Shore holds), it's still a really interesting, thought-provoking, entertaining read—a great starting point for Murakami novices, but with Murakami-ness enough to keep his long-time rabid fans happy as well.