Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

Love it or hate it, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is on the Norwegian Wood side of Haruki Murakami's writing, dealing with personality issues and difficult relationships, but it still has the author's familiar diversions into surrealism, magic realism, post-modernism or whatever you want to call the dream-like flights of imagination and strange connections that his sensitive characters establish with the world around them.

At the heart of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is a typically sensitive young man, a misfit with emotional problems who struggles with relationships. It wasn't always that way, Tazaki once an equal part of a close-knit group of five friends in Nagoya. Murakami's unique outlook on the dynamic of the group is interesting, each of the two boys and two girls having a name that refers to a colour, while Tazaki is "colourless". And in some ways that reflect how TT sees himself. When Tazaki leaves to go to university in Tokyo, he finds himself inexplicably banished from having any further contact with his friends. TT's life and outlook is profoundly affected by this until 16 years later when he goes back looking for answers.

The questions Muarkami grapples with in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki are the familiar psychological issues of identity, sexuality and death that are covered in Norwegian Wood, mixed with feelings of guilt, sin and questions of evil. Some of the situations and character types are similar to that book, but given a bit more of a latter-day Murakami spin, with the surreal nightmarish qualities of After Dark and the heightened sexual situations of South of the Border, West of the Sun. Instead of the Beatles, this time we also have Liszt, so all the usual Murakami tropes are in there.

Which makes you wonder whether Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage has anything new to offer from this author. It doesn't really, but it is still a good read and is possibly something of a pilgrimage for the author himself, going back to revisit a youthful work, explore its mysteries with a more mature outlook, and even in some way seek - as Colorless Tsukuru does - to 'exorcise the evil spirit' that still has a hold over him to some extent. Sometimes it's best leaving the mystery alone, but there's still a lot of unanswered questions in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and a lot of classic Murakami here.

Incidentally, for those who still care about such matters and haven't yet moved to a Kindle, the US Knopf hardcover edition of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage is a beauty to behold, with gorgeous graphic design and a compact size that is a joy to hold in your hands.  Such matters are not incidental to the pleasure of reading Murakami.

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