Tsukuru, though “pretty good-looking” and diligent in pursuit of his nerdish vocational ambition to design railway stations, considers himself nondescript. One day, inexplicably, the four friends cut him off, plunging him into a suicidal depression and years of self-doubt. The fifth, Tsukuru Tazaki, whose first name means “to make”, has no colour. Mr Red and Mr Blue, Ms White and Ms Black. By coincidence, four of the five have colours in their names: Akamatsu – “red pine”, Oumi – “blue sea”, Shirane – “white root” and Kurono – “black field”. A group of five high school adolescents form a tight-knit friendship. This book shows that Murakami can find mystery in the mundane and conjure it in sparse, Raymond Carveresque prose.
Others, though, will be thankful that they don’t have to wade through quite so many pages. Some readers will consider the new book too contained and restrained, and will lament the fact that there is no denouement featuring a man wearing a goat-head (to be fair, there is a short digression about a man who carries death in a little bag). It’s a return, in some ways, to the territory of Norwegian Wood (1987), the relatively straightforward and hugely successful love story that made Murakami famous.Īt a mere 298 pages in its English translation, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is far shorter than his usual literary wanderings. But in his latest, stripped-down novel, we are mostly in the world as we know it – or at least as we think we know it – though there are, naturally, forays into dreams and the subconscious. Menacing creatures writhe beneath the Tokyo metro. A giant frog visits a nervous bank clerk. In several of his stories, that alternative reality takes on physical form.
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