“Contemplate things in a pure, free sort of way.

“I just want to think deeply about things,” he says. Haida is a self-proclaimed philosopher in the making, and he sits on the cusp of the earnest and the absurd. Thus reconstituted, he even makes a new friend: a beautiful young man named Haida, whose dialogue really deserves to be read in a dorm room at 3 a.m. The dreaminess of the passage is its stylistic trademark, but there are other, less woozy ways to say that bitter experience toughens Tsukuru into a new man. Murakami is so beloved by his fans, who will go to any lengths to justify why a minor book like “Colorless Tsukuru” still has the author’s special je ne sais quoi. This is the kind of blah surrealism for which Mr. It merely settled on his body as a shadowy swarm, laying an ample amount of shadowy eggs.” what? “Tsukuru couldn’t fathom what this substance was. For one thing, in one of the book’s most graphic passages, his body is torn apart by birds with razor-sharp beaks, and his old flesh replaced by. The four ex-friends stay back in their hometown, so Tsukuru would appear to have moved on. Once Tsukuru has suffered his high school calamity, he moves on to Tokyo to attend college. But here it is just one more reason for Colorless Tsukuru to feel sorry for himself, because he has lost two male friends, Aka (short and stubborn) and the gung-ho Ao (“Losing is not an option!”) and two female ones, Shiro (tall and slim, with a doll’s look) and Kuro (less beautiful, but smarter). Murakami’s fans lather up about why he deserves a Nobel Prize in Literature, maybe they will cite that as meaningful. The other four all have names that denote colors in Japanese. So the main thing we know about the self-important five friends is that “like an equilateral pentagon, where all sides are the same length, their group’s formation had to be composed of five people exactly - any more or less wouldn’t do. Murakami or his translator, Philip Gabriel, likes to bludgeon each new thought with brutal repetition. This book is as short on explanations as it is long on overwrought adolescent emotion.Īnd either Mr.

And the author is tossing around phrases like “bowels of death,” “thick cloud of nothingness” and “dark, stagnant void.” It would help if we knew just what kind of Eden Tsukuru had been cast out of, but no. Murakami can still channel the agonies of a high school student who thought that he and his four best friends were the center of the universe - until the cruel, fateful day when the friends stopped speaking to him for no apparent reason.Īs “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” begins, the title character is at death’s door because of this sudden rejection. Chalk up some of Haruki Murakami’s rock-star status to the way he evokes the self-pitying narcissism of youth.

Colorless tsukuru tazaki