It has been a while since Haruki Murakami has given us the taut, narrative package of a 300-page novel. Over the last two decades, he has produced collections of short stories, non-fiction meditations and very long (and in my view, meandering) novels like 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore. Those gave his readers their fix, their happy sojourns into what his fans call the “Murakami world.” But in his most recent book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, the 67-year-old Japanese author has delivered his most deftly told love story since Norwegian Wood, a story that is at once incredibly ordinary and yet told in a way that is utterly magical. It is a telling parable of contemporary life, and also possibly his most “Japanese” novel to date.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki focuses on the existential hopes and traumas of a man as he ages out of the eternal promises of high school friendships into the highly segmented, middle-aged society of single-person apartments, train station commutes and salaried employment. Murakami has always set his novels in Japan and featured Japanese characters, but this is the first that feels like a meditation on Japanese society itself.
When I started reading Murakami 20 years ago, borrowing novel after novel from the Taipei Public Library on Jianguo South Road (建國南路), one of my great impressions was about how culturally nonspecific, or even generically Western, his stories felt. His characters listened to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, they read Sherlock Holmes and drank whisky. They had sex, fell in love and held an honest confusion about the meaning of their jobs, lives and goals. His prose felt strangely international, as if hardly translated. One of his English translators, Jay Rubin, even wrote a book about that.
Rubin described Murakami as a huge fan of Raymond Carver, who translated his novels and short stories in the afternoons, after spending his mornings writing novels. When writing Japanese, he often conceived of thoughts in English and translated back to Japanese. The result is a sort of universalist prose that’s perfect for a globalized world. It translates easily into a multitude of languages (more than 50 so far); linguistic plays are kept to a minimum, cultural references carry easily and there is a seeming absence of the “untranslatable.” Murakami’s prose seems to anticipate the Internet age, where all information is supposed to be — and in fact designed to be — universal.
Yet despite Murakami’s globalist prose, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki feels like a conscious attempt to come to terms with contemporary Japan. Admittedly it’s the only Murakami novel I have ever read while in Japan. And my impression of the novel is certainly grounded in my own experience of Tokyo’s vast train networks, masses of commuters and the unexpectedly pristine natural setting and tall trees of Yoyogi Park.
The novel’s titular character, Tsukuru Tazaki, is almost an archetypal Japanese conformist, a man who designs train stations for a living, takes moderate daily exercise, and in every way lives a routine existence. Though Murakami never describes him as such, Tazaki is a salaryman. Near the novel’s end, however, Murakami steps out of the narrative for a moment to offer the opinions of Murakami the essayist. Here he takes issue with a photo of Japanese salarymen published in the international press in the 1990s.
“As if by agreement,” writes Murakami, “all the commuters were gazing downward, their expressions strained and unhappy, looking more like lifeless fish packed in a can than people. The article said, ‘Japan may be affluent, but most Japanese look like this, heads downcast and unhappy-looking.’”
He then goes on to explain, “The real reason that most passengers... were looking down was less that they were unhappy than that they were concerned about their footing. Don’t slip down the stairs, don’t lose a shoe — these are the major issues on the minds of the commuters in the mammoth station during rush hour.” He dismisses this deeply philosophical question of “unhappiness” with a statement of banal pragmatism. This is very Japanese, but not very Murakami.
This is also at odds with the major narrative of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, which seems to present a completely different answer to the question of Japanese unhappiness.
The main character is a Japanese everyman, who views himself as “colorless” and in fact nearly invisible. He is highly isolated in society and for a period of his life seriously contemplates suicide. After he leaves his home town of Nagoya to attend university in Tokyo, his high school friends inexplicably turn their backs on him, refusing to speak with him ever again. He never replaces them, finding only one or two friends in the following decades, and they too mysteriously disappear. However, he finds a measure of meaning in his work, the painstaking design of safety features and crowd flows in railway stations.
The novel’s major narrative is about this everyman as he comes to terms with the lost friendships of his youth so that he can build a new life in his late 30s. He tracks down his old high school friends, finding that despite their varying degrees of success, they are also firmly gridded into the social structure, or even smothered by it. Only one has escaped — by marrying a Western artist, a potter, and moving to his native home of Finland — but this feels like freedom in exile. From the standpoint of metro Tokyo, relocating to the snowy Finnish countryside might as well be moving to the edge of the earth.
Murakami is often described as a surrealist, but existentialist is more apt. This novel is like so many of his others, marvelously and warmly conveyed, a story coming as if told to you by your best friend.
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is also a story of bare life — of love, friendship, loss and the possibility of meaning within the framework of a rigid yet invisible social structure. It is certainly one of his finest, and also one of his most significant insights into the culture of contemporary Japan.
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