His girlfriend Sara–whose attraction to him is, once again, hard to explain–says he will never be a whole person until he finds out what happened. That abandonment has haunted Tsukuru ever since. One day, with no explanation, they told him they’d never speak to him again.
“I don’t even have anything to offer myself.” In high school, he had four close friends, each of whose last names contained a word for a color. “I basically have nothing to offer to others,” he thinks. He’s content in his work but dogged by a sense that he has no personality. He lives in Tokyo and is unmarried and virtually friendless. Tsukuru is a 36-year-old engineer who designs train stations. He cops to the emptiness of his hero right up front: “Everything about him was middling, pallid, lacking in color.” But what intrigued me about his latest novel, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, is that it’s explicitly about that blankness. He’s widely beloved, but the persistent flatness of his prose and the passivity and blankness of his protagonists have always irked me, all the more so because said passivity and blankness in no way deter other characters from wanting to sleep with them. I’m an outlier on Haruki Murakami, I know.
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