Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Themes

Dreams and Reality

Dreams play a crucial role in this novel. Murakami explores how dreams can affect our conscious behavior and moods. Tsukuru has several striking dreams, each so vivid and intense that they linger in his mind for days, or sometimes years to come. Typically, these dreams have a sexual component: A dream in which a woman demanded that Tsukuru choose either her body or her heart stirred him out of his despondency after his high school friends abandoned him. The passionate feelings he still had the morning after the dream so severely contrasted with his waking apathy that his psyche was jolted out of its depression.

At the same time, the novel deliberately obscures the line between dreams and reality. Often, Tsukuru has dreams so realistic—or so wish-fulfilling—that he cannot tell the difference between wakefulness and sleep. The most significant of these happens when Tsukuru has what reads almost like a lucid dreaming experience: Tsukuru thinks he wakes and sees his college friend Haida in his room. However, the novel never quite confirms whether Tsukuru is actually seeing Haida: “how much of this is real? he wondered. That wasn’t a dream or an illusion. It had to be real. But it lacked the weight you’d expect from reality” (94). Readers cannot really determine what is happening in this sequence: Is Haida actually standing in Tsukuru’s room? Complicating the episode further, Tsukuru next dreams in graphic detail about a sexual encounter with Kuro and Shiro—a dream that clearly expresses a sincerely held desire. However, as Tsukuru is about to climax, the women are replaced by Haida performing oral sex on him. Even the next day, Tsukuru cannot decipher whether he really lived this violation or whether it was something summoned up by his imagination. Either way, Tsukuru is so shocked by the possibility of attraction toward Haida that he gets into a sexual relationship with a woman just to prove to himself that he isn’t gay.

The slippage between dream and reality changes how Tsukuru acts and what he thinks of himself. When we learn that Shiro had accused him of rape, although all of his friends assert their utmost belief that he did not do it, Tsukuru’s inability to fully tell dream from reality means his sexual dreams about Shiro might be pointing at something that actually happened. The novel ends without resolving Tsukuru’s relationship with his dreams: Rather than answer the phone to talk to his love interest Sara in real life, he goes to sleep wishing to see her in his dreams.

The Formation of Self

Tsukuru finds it hard to fit into society because he is unsure who he is. Because of this, his concept of self is in some ways defined by what others think of him. The novel confirms this view, describing Tsukuru mostly in comparison to others: Unlike his friends, he is “colorless”; like Haida, he is introverted; unlike Haida, who has a broad range of interests, Tsukuru’s intellectual life revolves only around train station design. When his high school friend group abandons him, the rejection causes such a loss of self-esteem that Tsukuru experiences a complete identity crisis. The novel suggests that declaring his love for Sara and pressing her to return his feelings is a moment of Bildung in this Bildungsroman, but his subsequent reticence to answer her phone call makes readers question whether he has really become an active participant in his life rather than a passive one.

The nature of what constitutes a self is explored throughout the novel. One suggestion is that identity is imposed on people from the outside: Before learning his name, Tsukuru doesn’t seem to exist:

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 (49).

This passage implies that Tsukuru is destined to be “colorless” as soon as he is named—from this seed, his “consciousness and memory developed.”

Other sections of the novel define identity as something constructed over time in stages, with a new self emerging to replace the old. When Tsukuru snaps out of his depression, emotional and psychological growth is described as death and rebirth:

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. […] 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 (41).

This image of the secretly buried younger self melds well with the novel’s interest in the way the past haunts its characters.

The novel wonders whether the wounds we receive in childhood become permanent elements of the self. Tsukuru traces lifelong sense of alienation to the trauma of being abandoned by his friends: “I still have that fear, even now—that suddenly my very existence will be denied […] Maybe that’s why I haven’t been able to form deep relationships with people. I always keep a distance between me and others” (234). The deep-seated fear of abandonment has stayed with Tsukuru across all stages of life and all versions of who he is. The novel doesn’t state how much of identity is self-constructed and how much acquired from external influences, though it does suggest that a more active engagement with the past could free Tsukuru from this permanently burdened self.

Memories and the Burden of the Past

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is the story of a man coming to terms with his past. His attempt at catharsis is a pursuit of relief from the emotional suffering he has been avoiding dealing with since childhood. As we watch him take the first steps in facing what happened to him long ago, the novel also shows us how other characters approach managing past trauma and harmful memories.

Tsukuru begins the novel as a fairly featureless character. After his friends abandoned him without explanation, the traumatic experience ripped a giant hole in his psyche. Although Tsukuru finally found his way out of his initial depression, rather than filling the emotional hole, he tried to simply wait his emotional injury out. Cutting out of his life all relationships and becoming more and more colorless, Tsukuru assumed that eventually somehow he would once again be ok. Underlying his blankness is the nightmarish past: “No matter how quiet and conformist a person’s life seems, there’s always a time in the past when they reached an impasse” (60)—an impasse that Tsukuru never traversed.

Other characters also wrestle with their past psychic wounds. Shiro’s approach is even more maladaptive than Tsukuru’s—she tried to paper over her sexual assault by accusing Tsukuru of rape, but this did nothing to stem her tremendous suffering or the lasting damage the attack and its aftermath inflicted. When Sara calls Shiro a person who’s lost her color, based on Aka’s description of her being somehow less attractive, we can see the similarities between her approach to her memories and Tsukuru’s. Kuro, on the other hand, actively rejects her past: She changes her name, leaves the country, and abandons the friend whose emotional crutch she had been for years. This healthier approach doesn’t necessarily fix old hurts, but it allows Kuro to build a new life—one in which she is whole.

Tsukuru’s past lingers, blocking him from maturing or growing by miring him in a kind of stasis: “You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them” (32). Sara points out the incongruity of waiting so long to get closure: “more than sixteen years have passed. You’re an adult now, in your late thirties. The pain might have been terrible back then, but isn’t it time to finally get over it?” (83). Tsukuru begins to recognize that to move on, he must detach himself from his memories: “Those four people are still stuck to me. Probably more tightly than Sara can ever imagine” (90). Confronting his past goes a long way to relieve him of its weight.