Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgramage: friendship, loss, love
Tsukuru Tazaki had nowhere he had to go. This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no pace to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now. The only place for him was where he was now.
I got this book at a blind book swap and it was labelled as ‘friendship’, ‘loss’, and ‘love’ — and it’s such a Murakami book in that it’s free-flowing, easy to read, lots of lifelike detail, and with a lost and confused male protagonist searching for his purpose in life. Having read Norwegian Wood and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, I still can’t make up my mind about Murakami. One of my friends told me that the way Murakami writes is the most accurate portrayal of how most guys actually think, and I found that wild. I can see that crystal clear when reading his works. Simple sentence structure, logical flow, emotions behind the scenes but not upfront, processing happens in the background, and some thoughts you just never share, and keep them permanently to yourself. “No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.” Visually sexual, not a lot of overanalysis, but a placated joy in the little things and in stillness and observation and wandering, searching for what you can provide.
At the start of the novel, Tsukuru Tazaki went through a pronounced period of grief triggered by a friendship fallout with four of his closest friends he went to high school with, all with colours in their names. Akamatsu (red pine), Oumi (blue sea), Shirane (white root) and Kurono (black field). Tazaki was the only colourless entity. They operated as a functional unit, and were close-knit inside of school and outside in extracurriculars in the suburbs of Nagoya. But when Tsukuru was cut off without closure, his days were shadowed by death. It became a period of sleepwalking, where he would conduct his routine, eat, interact with people when necessary, and return to his solitary apartment, sit, the “profound silence squeezing his eardrums”.
Everything was fine— then they cut him off. Just one day, they all stopped returning his phone calls or reaching out to him in unison. And that left an emotional scar in Tsukuru, because that friend group was fundamental to his identity. He opened up to one more person later in university, a fellow swimmer he met through routine and conversations, but after growing closer, this friend also slipped away without reason or rhyme. He just didn’t hear from this friend for a while, and then realized, that maybe without a word, without a reason, this friend decided not to see him anymore. This, is a strange but also not unfathomable concept to me. People come together, and people come apart.
Parting so suddenly, Tsukuru spent years of his life in disharmony, then eventually ignoring his need for closure by burying it. “It’s a waste of time to think about things you can’t know.”
As close as they once were in their high school friend group, after years, Tsukuru muses to himself how people can change. “And no matter how close we once were, and no matter how much they we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us knew anything substantial about the other.” I think as much as Tsukuru is trying to make sense of the changes and find peace within his current self to cope, it’s not entirely true that you can make judgments, with all this present information, especially with the warped passage of time, on your past and dismiss those emotions you felt once felt so vividly and wholeheartedly — that’s like gaslighting yourself. In a sense, because Tsukuru was struck with hurt so suddenly, I think he lost the ability to trust himself — you can see it in how he navigates these emotions. If your past self felt that way and was convinced that you knew a person, and even if you no longer know them now, your present self doesn’t need to negate those feelings you once felt. What’s real is your now, I suppose. And at a previous point in time, that now was true to you.
And his girlfriend Sara picked up on it, mentioning that he has something deep from his past, always with them, unprocessed, preventing him from fully accepting himself and fully being there, even when they were making love. Tsukuru didn’t pick up on it until Sara mentioned that he has this deep void inside of him, and a feeling of “colorlessness”, because he was abandoned, and in a sense, he abandoned himself, so this fear of abandonment was always with them, in the room.
It’s also strange what we consider as close friends. After the group drifted apart, and after Kuro escaped to Finland with her Finnish husband to her life abroad, she says this about Aka. “He used to be one of my very best friends, and even now, I still consider him a good friend. Though I haven’t seen him in seven or eight years.” When you’ve spent four year together and then decades apart, the metric of closeness isn’t measured by the uniform passage of time.
When Tsukuru flew to Finland to see Kuro, his close high school friend who he hasn’t seen in much more than a decade, the slow feelings that emerged from the familiarity and admiration of a person comes back. In the beginning, it’s a sense of frozenness, of being shocked, disarmed, and cautiously alert, but then there’s a subtle melting of ice, and then overflowing warmth, musing about how their past is linked to the other’s past, and their pain is linked to pain, and how they’re not just connected through harmony along but through their wounds. And then acknowledging, respectfully, that this may be the last time that they see each other in a lifetime, which very well may be true.
“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them… If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”
There are these two Japanese concepts of Hone and Tatamae at odds in a dichotomy here in this book. ‘Honne’ (本音) is someone’s private feelings and desires, shared with people close to them, like Tsukuru with Sara and Kuru. ‘Tatemae’ (建前) are opinions one displays in public, which may not necessarily reflect their true feelings but are used to maintain social order, and in a sense, how Tsukuru believes how other people percieve him.
After being cut off, Tsukuru was depressed and questioned himself incessantly. Eventually, the depression lifted, but not without leaving a haze that he still carries with him. He says to himself, that he basically has nothing to offer to others, and if you think about it, he doesn’t even have anything to offer himself. He thinks he’s an NPC pretty much — no personality, no brilliant colour.
He says, “I feel like an empty vessel. I have a shape, I guess, as a container, but there’s nothing inside. I just can’t see myself as the right person for her. I think that the more time passes, the more she knows about me, the more disappointed Sara will be, and the more she’ll choose to distance herself from me.”
To which Kuro responds, “You need to have courage, and be confident in yourself. I mean — I used to love you, right? At one time, I would have given myself to you. I would have done whatever you wanted me to do… [And] let’s say you are an empty vessle. So what? What’s wrong with that? You’re still a wonderful, attractive vessel. And really, does anybody know who they are? So why not be a completely beautiful vessel? The kind people feel good about, the kind people want to entrust with precious belongings.
“Tsukuru Tazaki is a wonderful, colorful person. A person who builds fantastic stations. A healthy thirty-six year old citizen, a voter, a taxpayer, someone who could fly all the way to Finland just to see me. You don’t lack anything. Be confident and bold. That’s all you need. Never let fear or stupid pride make you lose someone who’s precious to you.”
And I think Tsukuru realized how other people always looked up to him. How despite his own self-deprecation, his friend group cut him off because they knew he could gracefully handle it. And how everyone always thought of him as the most attractive guy in the group, the ones that everybody’s mom would love. It’s interesting how we view ourselves, versus how other people view us, and the jarring gap in between. And Tsukuru Tazaki thought that,
“No… I’m not cool and collected [like they think of me], and I’m not always doing things at my own pace. It’s just a question of balance. I’m just good at habitually shifting the weight I carry around from one side of the fulcrum to the other, distributing it. But it isn’t an easy operation. It takes more time than it seems. And even if I do find the right balance, that doesn’t lessen the total weight one bit.”
So it’s so interesting how we perceive others’ experiences and abilities, and how they go through that experience and self-perception themselves. You can never assume. And some pieces of closure takes half a lifetime to process and figure out, and it’s not perfect, most things will not have answers waiting for you at all, but that truly is life. Life must be lived forwards and understood backwards.
