The cult of Murakami

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage

By Haruki Murakami

Knopf Books, 386 pages

Available at National Book Store

No sooner had I got my copy of Haruki Murakami’s latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, and someone started fondling the cover. “I love this cover,” the book fondler said. “I’d like to have my own book, just so I could have a cover like this.”

This did not seem the highest praise to lavish on a book, that you adored the cover. True, all of Murakami’s books are beautifully printed and designed, and this one’s no exception, resembling one of those Tokyo subway maps with a clear plastic casing protecting it. On the cover, strips of color make up the fingers of a hand, while the thumb is smaller and reveals a subway map.

All this attention to design (Chip Kidd did the US edition) extends to the novels themselves, which are so meticulously written, so singular in outlook and surreal details that they have come to resemble a brand: the Murakami brand, complete with Lynchian touches usually involving doppelgangers, cats, whiskey, swimming, ironing, classical music, jazz and/or pop music. To say that Murakami puts out novels with a striking similarity of tone, almost like clockwork, is not really a criticism. But it does come to seem like you know what to expect from Murakami, so that it’s actually a breath of fresh air when he writes instead about earthquakes or writing or why he enjoys running.

The surprise of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is that it contains little of the bizarre alternate realities that populate The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles or Kafka on the Shore, yet feels like one of his most satisfying books so far, telling a simple, direct story. The fact that it’s much shorter than recent opuses — doorstops like 1Q84 — means you read it very quickly and focus very attentively, waiting (in vain, mostly) for the outlines to start shimmering and reveal strange, otherworldly glimpses. And in the process, you find you’ve read one of Murakami’s most intimate novels yet.

Tsukuru Tazaki is a man in his 30s who designs railroad stations in Tokyo. He is examining his own life, its direction and meaning, 16 years after being dumped unceremoniously by a group of four friends while in college. While the others — Ao, Ako, Shiro and Kuro — possess names that are the Japanese words for different colors, Tsukuru’s name, in Japanese, means “gray.” This is how he perceives himself, and why he attempts suicide in his sophomore year after being told, over the phone, that his friends never want to see him again.

This mystery haunts Tsukuru for 16 years until adulthood, coloring his outlook and view of life until he meets a somewhat older woman — Sara — who explains that, if he wants to have an adult relationship with her, he must shed this mental baggage and begin life anew.

Thus begins Tsukuru’s pilgrimage, a period of his life where he tracks down his old friends and tries to learn what happened.

A simple story. Yet, this being Murakami, there’s always room for the odd surreal detail or anecdote. He hears from a friend, Haida, about a piano player that his father once met at a hot springs spa: a jazz pianist who kept a mysterious little knotted bag on his piano whenever he played — was it a talisman? A vestigial amputated sixth finger? The piano player tells of meeting someone who passed along to him his own death, a token that the pianist must now either pass on to another, or bear himself. The imminence of death, Tsukuru is told, brings on a heightened experience of reality, something the pianist would gladly exchange his own life for again.

There is the usual disturbing erotic scene, something Murakami excels at writing, wherein Tsukuru finds himself dreaming of being entwined with the two women from his barkada, naked in bed, only for the dream to come to an unsettling conclusion.

But for once, in a long while at least, Murakami restrains all the talking cats and sinister Planter’s Peanut Men and evil Johnnie Walkers from his midst. All the phantoms in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki can be explained as mental phenomena, though there is always the question of evil — its real possibility — lurking close by.

The Murakami brand is now so eagerly awaited by fans — first in Japan, where his works are received in their written language, then in translated form by Western hipsters who like to fondle book covers — that you could say a cult exists around the writer, now in his 60s.

The author shed some light on his own life and artistic development in his memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, and this, rather than demystifying the author, seems to have strengthened his cult. Because, while his approach may echo people like David Lynch and other Surrealists at times, it is unmistakably his own singular outlook. His watch.

The author has always made a point of keeping up to date — references to Twitter, Facebook, iPods, modern pop divas and the like are casually tossed into the story — and as always, there’s a haunting musical piece guiding the story, as in Norwegian Wood. Here it’s Lazar Berman’s piano performance of Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage (cultists might even want to drop their own copy of “Le Mal Du Pays” on a turntable or play it on iPod while reading the book).

Why is music so important to Murakami? Why is it the connecting motif of so many of his novels?

This passage sheds some light.

Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It’s next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there’s no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people’s lives be so convoluted?

This is the remarkable problem facing not only writers and composers and performers, but all of us, as we try to share our experience with others.

That Murakami has managed to do so in an elegant, concise novel like this is worthy of applause.