His girlfriend Sara–whose attraction to him is, once again, hard to explain–says he will never be a whole person until he finds out what happened. That abandonment has haunted Tsukuru ever since. One day, with no explanation, they told him they’d never speak to him again.
“I don’t even have anything to offer myself.” In high school, he had four close friends, each of whose last names contained a word for a color. “I basically have nothing to offer to others,” he thinks. He’s content in his work but dogged by a sense that he has no personality. He lives in Tokyo and is unmarried and virtually friendless. Tsukuru is a 36-year-old engineer who designs train stations. He cops to the emptiness of his hero right up front: “Everything about him was middling, pallid, lacking in color.” But what intrigued me about his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is that it’s explicitly about that blankness. He’s widely beloved, but the persistent flatness of his prose and the passivity and blankness of his protagonists have always irked me, all the more so because said passivity and blankness in no way deter other characters from wanting to sleep with them. Two old translators recall the Murakami phenomenon 16.I’m an outlier on Haruki Murakami, I know. Chasing wild sheep: The breakthrough of Murakami Haruki in the West 15. Manifestations of creativity: Murakami Haruki as translator Part 4: Personal stories from the industry 14.
Trumping 1Q84/Nineteen Eighty-Four? Reading Murakami and Orwell in a dystopian era 13. Modern Japanese and European genre history in Murakami's and Soseki's coming-of-age novels 12. Ask the horse: Murakami's views on literary creation and the nature of inspiration 11. Escape from stereotype? Male-male sexuality in the fiction of Murakami Haruki Part 3: Literary dialogues 10. Man without Woman: Sexual relationship in the postmodern era 9. Voyeuristic gaze, narratological construction, and the gender problem in Murakami Haruki's After Dark 8. Murakami's first-person narrators and female character construction 7. Food culture, consumerism and Murakami Haruki: The kitchen in 'Zo no shometsu' Part 2: Narrative and genders 6. Murakami Haruki's Tokyo: Spatial transformation and sociocultural displacement, disconnection, and disorientation 5. History and metaphysical narrative space 4. From hara-hara to doki-doki: Murakami Haruki's use of humour and his predicament since 1Q84 3. 1.Yes, Murakami Haruki is a challenge, Gitte Marianne Hansen and Michael Tsang Part 1: Temporal and spatial dimensions 2.
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