Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“The whole convergence was like a lucky but entirely accidental chemical fusion, something that could only happen once. You might gather the same materials and make identical preparations, but you would never be able to duplicate the result.”

This passage highlights the singularity of Tsukuru’s friend group, which came together through accident but became incredibly naturally cohesive—or at least so Tsukuru believed at the time. The simile of formulating a complex chemical implies that some things really can only happen once. 

“The only real interest he had was train stations. He wasn’t sure why, but for as long as he could remember, he had loved to observe train stations.”

Tsukuru’s temperament and the nature of train stations are perfectly aligned. For most people, stations are portals to pass through on their way from one place to the next. For Tsukuru, however, they are places to never leave; his affinity for train stations marks him as a perpetual passenger in his own life.

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.”

This idea informs much of the novel, which argues that to move forward into mature adulthood, one must ultimately confront the past. Tsukuru tries to simply ignore the psychic injuries he carries from the abandonment from his friend group, but all he is really doing is hiding his pain without dealing with it.

“A sudden thought struck him—maybe I really did die.”

The novel often plays with the ambiguity between literal and figurative death. Here, in the midst of obsessively thinking about the end of his life for six months, Tsukuru imagines that his death has already come to pass. This dark thought echoes the later description of him getting out of his depression (see Quotation 7), and his eventually putting himself into the shoes of Shiro’s murderer.

“Tsukuru Tazaki only understood this later, but it was at this point that he stopped wanting to die.”

The end of Tsukuru’s obsession with dying comes on the heels of a dream about a woman who demands he pick either her body or her heart to be with—an unnatural and inhuman separation that fills him with a jealous rage, an emotion he has never experienced before. The emotional intensity releases Tsukuru from his despondency.

“In any case, the boy named Tsukuru Tazaki had died. In the savage darkness he’d breathed his last and was buried in a small clearing in the forest. Quietly, secretly, in the predawn while everyone was still fast asleep. There was no grave marker. And what stood here now, breathing, was a brand-new Tsukuru Tazaki, one whose substance had been totally replaced. But he was the only one who knew this. And he didn’t plan to tell.”

The novel posits that moments of epiphany or dramatic change are actually times of death and rebirth. Here, overcoming his depression doesn’t simply transform Tsukuru, but destroys his old self and creates a brand new one. The anonymous nature of the younger Tsukuru’s death is fitting for his nondescript and generally “colorless” existence.

“That’s how he became the person known as Tsukuru Tazaki. Before that, he’d been nothing—dark, nameless chaos and nothing more. A less-than-seven-pound pink lump of flesh barely able to breathe in the darkness, or cry out. First, he was given a name. Then consciousness and memory developed, and, finally, ego. But everything began with his name.”

Murakami makes a significant philosophical point here as he probes at the starting point of human consciousness. Since names provide some semblance of predictability in a universe ruled by chaos and unpredictability, could they be responsible for grafting identities onto their bearers? This is a primary tension in the novel, which is interested in the color roots of names—roots that render Tsukuru’s name colorless.

“‘Le mal du pays.’ It’s French. Usually it’s translated as ‘homesickness,’ or ‘melancholy.’ If you put a finer point on it, it’s more like ‘a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape.’ It’s a hard expression to translate accurately.”

Haida provides an interpretation of Franz Liszt’s composition here. Mention of this piece is recurrent throughout the novel, and the melancholy tone of this piano composition matches the novel’s tone and Tsukuru’s inherent personality.

“No matter how quiet and conformist a person’s life seems, there’s always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives.”

Before telling the story of Midorikawa, Haida suggests that behind every normal-seeming person is some kind of crisis point or watershed moment. The idea that identity is forged in stages marked by definite and marked transitions—before and after states—lines up with Tsukuru’s earlier fantasy that the end of his depression meant the death of a younger version of him and his rebirth.

“As he listened to the music in this junior-high music room deep in the mountains, as the sole audience for the performance, Haida felt all that was unclean inside him washed away.”

Haida’s father, also named Haida, experienced an internal purification from hearing Midorikawa—the man who believed he was doomed to die in a month—play the piano, reiterating the novel’s motif about music’s power and influence on human psychology.

“You need to use the thread of logic, as best you can, to skillfully sew onto yourself everything that’s worth living for.”

Midorikawa offers this advice to Haida’s father: Logic is our best shot at finding meaning in a universe that is mostly random and chaotic. Logic is the antithesis to absurdism.

“When he didn’t see her for a while it was as if something vital were missing from his life, and a dull ache settled in his chest. He hadn’t felt this way in a long time.”

Tsukuru’s affection for Sara has a slightly negative, confusing quality—rather than positive passion and desire in her presence, he experiences “a dull ache” when she is gone. The final sentence of the passage is ambiguous: It is unclear who caused the same dull ache, but presumably it was Shiro—or potentially, Haida.

“Sara is right, he thought as he lay down on his bed. Those four people are still stuck to me. Probably more tightly than Sara can ever imagine.”

Tsukuru considers the effect that his friend group’s rejection still has on him years later. He admits that Sara is correct here, a tacit recognition that he knows that he must confront his old friends.

“But he wasn’t given the answer. After a long silence Haida—or Haida’s alter ego—quietly left.”

Tsukuru seems to notice Haida standing in his room while he is drifting to sleep, but in his confused state, Tsukuru can’t tell whether he is asleep or awake. The narrator magnifies Tsukuru’s unreliable narration by not clarifying whether it is a real or imagined Haida in the room. The distinction is incredibly important: If this is a dream then Tsukuru’s subconscious has just been exploring different sexualities; however, if Haida is there for real, then his performing oral sex on a sleeping Tsukuru is sexual assault.

“Though he probably would never have admitted it, he was hoping to prove to himself that he wasn’t gay, that he was capable of having sex with a real woman, not just in his dreams. This was his main objective. And he achieved his goal.”

The narrator provides rationale for why Tsukuru cannot decide whether his sexually explicit dream about Shiro and Kuro led to the one about Haida, or whether Haida sexually assaulted him in real life. The revulsion, or possibly desire, he feels at the idea of the encounter prompts him to mentally keep the incident ambiguous. The gay panic that drives him to sleep with a woman just to prove his heterosexuality is telling.

“The sky was covered with a thin layer of clouds, not a patch of blue visible anywhere, though it did not look like rain. There was no wind, either. The branches of a nearby willow tree were laden with lush foliage and drooping heavily, almost to the ground, though they were still, as if lost in deep thought. Occasionally a small bird landed unsteadily on a branch, but soon gave up and fluttered away. Like a distraught mind, the branch quivered slightly, then returned to stillness.”

This long metaphor explains Tsukuru’s overburdened mind through the natural imagery. Like the tree so heavily overlaid with foliage that it “droops to the ground,” Tsukuru is so deeply affected by his friends’ rejection that new inner life cannot penetrate his already overwrought mind. Those new thoughts that do come—like the birds here—only very briefly affect his impenetrable mental state until they are forced to flee. Like this unproductive tree, which neither bears fruit nor can host nesting birds, Tsukuru’s mind is full but barren.

“I’ve always seen myself as an empty person, lacking color and identity. Maybe that was my role in the group. To be empty.”

Ao is the first of Tsukuru’s former friends that he confronts. Tsukuru’s reflection as to how he fits into the group shows the first step in the journey of self-discovery that he is undertaking.

“One other thing I learned from working in a company was that the majority of people in the world have no problem following orders. They’re actually happy to be told what to do. They might complain, but that’s not how they really feel. They just grumble out of habit. If you told them to think for themselves, and make their own decisions and take responsibility for them, they’d be clueless. So I decided I could turn that into a business.” 

Tsukuru’s friend Aka explains his business with blunt directness. The dystopian feel of what Aka is trying to accomplish allows Murakami to insert a sociological critique of attempts to control and limit human nature. Generally, people want to fall in line and do not want the responsibility that comes from true freedom.

“Take your time. I can wait, Sara had said. But things weren’t that simple. People are in constant motion, never stationary. No one knows what will happen next.”

Tsukuru inherently recognizes the flaw in Sara’s comment. Because of the nature of time, things always can change. The thought also recalls Tsukuru’s association with train stations.

“Still, being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It’s when you can’t even feel any pain anymore that you’re in real trouble.”

After he sees Sara walking with another man, Tsukuru realizes that he has grown as a person. Rather than sinking back into the apathy he was mired in at the beginning of the novel, he has an emotional response that allows him to feel the full range of his humanity—something he no longer hides from.

“One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.”

The most significant lesson Tsukuru learns in the book is that the universal human experience includes pain and suffering just as much as it includes happiness. In fact, the ability to experience both positive and negative emotions is much more psychologically healthy than trying to cut off the sensation of bad feelings. Both the light and dark parts of the psyche connect us to others through empathy.

“No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.”

The novel points to the limits of spoken communication in a variety of ways: the language barrier between Tsukuru and Olga, Kuro/Eri’s choice to marry a Finnish man, and the constant miscommunications that plague Tsukuru’s awkward relationships with others. The issue is compounded by the fact that the novel was written in Japanese and we are reading it in translation. Here, the narrator concludes that the issue of making ourselves understood is universal. Interestingly, the word “cannot” implies that there are things about ourselves that must remain hidden.

“That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.”

Inasmuch as we’d like to relive our greatest moments, we can only travel through time in one direction. At the heart of this passage is a feeling of acceptance at the natural course of life.