Tsukuru himself isn’t completely au fait with the modern world but Sarah helps, using Google and Facebook and the like to hunt down details. Why did they reject him? She senses there is some blockage in him, something that he needs to resolve, something that the answer to the question might help with. The 36 year old Tsukuru meets a woman called Sarah and she encourages him to go back and hunt down his former friends to find out what actually went on. His face changed shape, his body changed shape, his mother could hardly recognise him. He lost couldn’t eat, lost weight, went joylessly through the motions of life. At the time their rejection almost killed him (he thinks). When he was young, he had four friends, each of whom had a colour in their name (and he didn’t, hence the ‘colorless’ of the title) – and they were tight until one day they rejected him, completely and utterly and without a word of explanation. He is lonely though, and somewhat self-deprecating. As a child he dreamed of building train stations (his name means ‘to make’, it was the only thing his father really gave him, apart from the condo in which he lives) – and it is disappointing to him that he doesn’t actually build the train stations, merely tweak and improve existing structures – but he appreciates that many people don’t get to work on things that interest him so he counts his blessings, for the most part. Our eponymous hero is a 36 year old man who works on train stations.
If you’re a fan, though, if you’re interested in what he does, in where he’s up to, in what he’s trying to accomplish, then there is much here that is fascinating and compelling. There is nothing in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage likely to dissuade the haters from hating. There are those, also, who just don’t get it, who just don’t see what the point of his books are. There are those who find his prose a bit stilted, and wonder about whether it’s actually Murakami or the translator. There are those who dismiss Murakami because he is a popular novelist (and after all, how can a popular novelist be taken seriously?!?), those who dismiss him because they think he’s a bit New Agey (a bit Paulo Coehlo, a bit Banana Yoshimoto), those who find his interest in such things as dreams and ‘temporal spaces’ to be annoying. A new book by Haruki Murakami has become a bit like a new Martin Amis – those people who like him quietly get excited, those people who don’t start to rumble and carry on.
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