A master of the slow burn

Haruki Murakami's latest novel goes to the heart of questions about human solitude and yearning to connect
A celebrity writer in his native Japan: Haruki Murakami
Ian Thomson7 August 2014

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami trans by Philip Gabriel (Harvill Secker, £20)

In Japan where he lives, Haruki Murakami is a celebrity author. His latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage, sold more than a million copies in its first week and had fans queuing up for his autograph. Written in a spare, unadorned prose, it tells of a Toyko railway engineer’s troubled past and his attempts to overcome it.

Engineer Tsukuru is a 36-year-old bachelor prone to morbid, sackcloth-and-ashes thoughts of death and self-denial. Half the time he wishes he was dead. “Alienation and loneliness” are all he knows; waking up to a new day is often more than he can bear. What is the matter?

Sixteen years earlier, we learn, Tsukuru had been part of a close-knit group of schoolfriends in the Chubu region of Japan. The group, three boys and two girls, provided Tsukuru with the sense of belonging and acceptance he craved as an adolescent. But then one dreadful day the group rejects him and never speaks to him again. Why?

Abandoned, Tsukuru becomes a paranoid and fear-ridden young man. Rather than insist on explanations, he enrols at university and, later, lives a life of exemplary tedium in Tokyo as a subway station designer. “I’ve always seen myself as an empty person, lacking in colour and identity,” he lets on, adding: “Maybe that was my role in the group. To be empty.” The self-doubt is about to end, however.

The engineer is forced to re-examine his past when a girlfriend, Sara, obliges him to reconnect with his tormentors. Surely Tsukuru’s sense of rejection will rankle less if he seeks them out, she says. Sara herself sets out to trace the ex-schoolmates via Facebook and Twitter. As she does so, Tsukuru begins to experience disconcerting erotic dreams about a girl in the group named Shiro. (“She straddled him, took hold of his rigid, erect penis… Her wet pubic hair, her hard nipples.”) That Tsukuru should burn with desire for Shiro two decades later is a mystery; Murakami hints at a supernatural agency.

In trepidation, Tsukuru prepares to meet the group and asks them why they had excluded him all those years ago. How will they react to seeing him? Perhaps the group is a figment of Tsukuru’s febrile imagination. Does Sara herself even exist? Murakami, a master of the slow burn, is in no hurry to tell us.

Like his adored Graham Greene, Murakami confronts big themes (friendship, forgiveness, the betrayal of loyalties) with a sombre eye. His gift as a novelist is to locate the moment of crisis when a character loses faith, religious or otherwise, and life is exposed in all its drab wonder. Colorless Tsukuru, a work of lapidary and suspenseful mystery, goes to the heart of questions about human solitude and yearning to connect. Admirers of Murakami’s previous novels — Norwegian Wood, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle — will not be disappointed.

Go to standard.co.uk/booksdirect to buy this book for £16, or phone 0843 060 0029, free UK p&p

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