Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
This is the second Murakami novel I’ve read, after Norwegian Wood. The book follows Tsukuru Tazaki, a middle-aged man who experienced a traumatic break during his college years. That one trauma plunged him into depression and although he recovered on the outside, the event never had proper resolution until he decides to find out the truth about the past – hence the title. Tsukuru is introspective and on the surface, uninteresting enough that he would not look out of place as a background character, and it’s this surface insignificance of the character that magnetically draws the reader – it’s what I loved about Norwegian Wood’s protagonist Toru as well. The topic of coming-of-age is supposed to evoke the nostalgia of the older as they reminisce of their own coming-of-age, though reading it as a 21 year old, it was more relatable than nostalgic, and it was powerful in its own way.
One of the book’s saddest but most central themes is that when left unnoticed, life fades away toward numbness. The novel makes frequent suggestions that at some point, past the naïve arcadia of youth, the light in people’s eyes diminish as young people pass through the gauntlet called circumstance and always emerge at least a little broken – yet this change happens so slowly that you don’t even feel the pain of the gauntlet unless you looked at the far past. It reminded me of the concepts of acedia and ennui, this idea of perpetual boredom, not quite depression but far from fulfillment. Having lived in New York for a summer, I’ve witnessed firsthand that the subway commuters often carry this grave, distracted face, all as one, staring at more uninteresting news on their phones. Murakami goes so far as to say that this gradual spiritual and emotional death by fading away is really the same as physically dying. Terrifyingly, it’s so much easier to fade into anonymity in big cities, and I’ve even felt a little bit of it creeping in even as I had so much to see and do during my summer in the city. I’m determined not to live in big cities long term, and only visit them, out of my fear for this invisible demon of fading (awkward to write since there’s not really even a non-archaic, modern term for it that comes to mind…) that haunts megacities so much.
% grep -i "colorless tsukuru tazaki and his years of pilgrimage" quotes.txt5 matches
on passion
“The human heart is like a night bird silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
on beauty
“Our lives are like a complex musical score, filled with all sorts of cryptic writing. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and could transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
on jealousy
“Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. The prison was, after all, his own heart”
— Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
on artistic frailty
“A single cavity, one aching shoulder, and the beautiful vision and sound I hoped to convey goes out the window”
— (Midorikawa), Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
on groups
“The world isn’t that easily turned upside down. It’s people who are turned upside down”
— (Haida), Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage