Colorless Tsukuru Tasaki

And His Years of Pilgrimage

by Haruki Murakami

I only recently heard of Murakami and wanted to give him a try. I think his IQ84 sounds interesting, but I wasn't willing to devote 900 pages to a writer I might hate, so I started with Tasaki instead. Turned out to be a much better choice because, not only is it much shorter (386 pages) but the pages are pretty small too, so it was a quick read. I blew through it in two days.

As it happens, I really liked this book. It's about a guy named Tsukuru who has no friends. He had four very close friends when he was in high school and they were the only friends he had. Then one day, in the middle of his sophomore year of college, they collectively decided that they no longer wanted to see, or hear from him ever again. They gave him no explanation. They just said, "Think about it, and you'll figure it out."

Of course, Tsukuru never did figure it out. He could not think of a single thing he had done wrong and everyone had acted normally the last time they had seen him.

It turns out I can relate. I had something similar happen to me when I was the same age. Not as drastic, of course, but I can absolutely empathize with Tsukuru spending the next six months just wishing he could die.

Now it's sixteen years later. Tsukuru is 36, still has no friends to speak of, but he has a job he likes and he's had a stream of steady girlfriends. Now he has a girlfriend he really likes (Sara) and he tells her all about his four friends from high school and I how they cruelly rejected him. He has never talked about this before to anyone, not even his parents, but Sara wants to know about his childhood and so Tsukuru finds himself opening up.

Sara insists on getting to the bottom of what happened. She asks Tsukuru to give her the names and last known addresses of these people so she can hunt them down. She's convinced that it's all just a big misunderstanding and that Tsukuru needs to find out what really happened so he can get past it and move on with his life. She thinks that he still bears some serious emotional scars that need to be dealt with. Given that he still has no friends, she may very well be on to something.

Sara tracks them down via the stalker's best friend that is the Internet and strongly urges Tsukuru to find and talk to the three of his four friends that are still living. He does, and it turns out that the group fell apart not long after he was shut out. It was a misunderstanding that led to cutting him out, but I won't spoil it for you.

I like the book, but Murakami is pretty heavy on the similes. Everything is like birds, or water, or rocks. At first I thought it was kind of cool. I thought his similes provided some wonderful imagery for his story and I wondered how he did that.

Then I realized he did that all the time. It started to get to me around page 300 and reminded me of Winter's Tale, which I hated. It makes me think that reading a 900-page book by him might not be such a great idea. Actually, I seem to have lost patience for most books over about 600 pages, so maybe I should just leave IQ84 to the Murakami fanatics.

The other thing that got me about this book was the open ending. I don't like open endings. I know life is full of them, but that's why I read fiction: so that everything can have a definite beginning, middle, and end. Fiction is my escape from life's uncertainty. Tsukuru does settle things with his friends (as much as something like that can be settled after 16 years), but we don't get to find out what happens with him and Sara and that kind of drives me crazy. I like Sara and I think she's really good for Tsukuru and I want him to be happy. I know a lot of people think that the open endings are cool, but personally, I think it's just lazy writing.