Colors play a big role in the story and hint at tensions between the characters. True to his form, Murakami fully engaged the reader’s senses as well. This sense of involvement was developed by Murakami’s fantastic ability to tell a story and the strength of Tazaki as a character. The story had slowly built up to such an intensity, that I didn’t fully realize it until I finished the last page and would have done anything to have gotten more. As I approached the final pages, I started to get very anxious about what the outcome might be and what sort of closure the reader would get.

By the middle, it had built up a lot of momentum and went by very quickly as it neared the end. While the book did do a good job of getting the reader hooked from the beginning, I found that I got more and more engaged as the story went on. It was never overly dramatic, but the mood simultaneously weighs the reader down and pushes them forward. The overall tone was rather dark, as Tazaki’s moods don’t vary far outside the range of passively suicidal lows to “highs” of mild acceptance of, and resignation to, life. I really enjoyed this reading experience, but man was this a heavy book. With Sara’s urging Tazaki feels he is ready to seek out and confront his former friends about the past and get the closure he needs to move on with his life. Some time later, during his second year away at university in Tokyo, Tazaki was informed out of nowhere that the other four group members were severing all communication with him, no reasons or explanations provided.

Growing up in Nagoya, Tazaki and four of his classmates comprised a close-knit, inseparable unit of friends that came together early in their highschool years. Through conversations with his girlfriend Sara and a series of flashbacks, we learn that he has spent a large part of his life struggling with feelings of emptiness and depression as a result of an incident that occurred some 16 years ago.

This book was the story of Tsukuru Tazaki, an engineer in his late-30s living in roughly present day Tokyo. Going in I had read just about every piece of Murakami’s fiction available in English, so this one had been high on my reading list since it was released. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage was first published in early 2013 for the Japanese market, while the English version I read came out in mid-2014. My adventure in reading continues, this time with another book by perhaps my favorite author: Haruki Murakami.

Colorless tsukuru tazaki author