Major Yammerton: Japanese Literature Challenge #5

I read this book for The Japanese Literature Challenge 15

色彩を持たない多崎つくると、彼の巡礼の年 - 2013

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage - Haruki Murakami

This coming of age story stars a male Japanese boomer in Tokyo in the middle 1980s. He learns about dealing with the unfairness of the world

The protagonist Tazaki suffered shunning by high school friends. The ostracism, which was never explained at the time, sent him into a six-month trough of depression and anxiety

All around him, for as far as he could see, lay a rough land strewn with rocks, with not a drop of water, nor a blade of grass. Colorless, with no light to speak of. No sun, no moon or stars. No sense of direction, either. At a set time, a mysterious twilight and a bottomless darkness merely exchanged places. A remote border on the edges of consciousness. At the same time, it was a place of strange abundance. At twilight birds with razor-sharp beaks came to relentlessly scoop out his flesh. But as darkness covered the land, the birds would fly off somewhere, and that land would silently fill in the gaps in his flesh with something else, some other indeterminate material.

Oo-ee-oo. Small wonder this period has haunted him for 15 years. As if this experience were not trying enough, a close friend in college also left him, perhaps doing away with himself.

Tazaki has held a good job, gets along with people at work and had love affairs, but he’s afraid to get close to anybody for fear that they will desert him too, when they find out he is a nowhere man. “I can understand how painful it is to be rejected,” author Murakami said in a 2013 interview. “When you get hurt, you may build an emotional wall around your heart. But after a while you can stand up and move on. That’s the kind of story I wanted to write.”

Tazaki is sleepwalking through life, but Sara Kimoto, a woman he is dating, tells him their relationship can't move forward unless he discovers the truth behind the ostracism. Through the miracle of social media and face to face interviews with the principals, he uncovers a painful story. The roots of the injustice done to him by his friends turn out to be deep and dense because each individual had understandable reasons for acting one way or another without necessarily thinking about the consequences. I mean, who does at 18 years old, especially in intricate situations?

Some readers may feel that the story is dragged out unnecessarily with too many moods and too much backtracking. Perhaps lead astray by the whydunnit aspect and the interviews with persons of interest that call to mind a mystery thriller, other readers are put out at the untidy resolution-free ending. Still others may rail, “Ugh, another male late thirties with a stunted personality like Norwegian Wood? Again with females that are little more than sex objects?” And while there’s some surrealism – see above quotation – there's only a dab of magical realism - which, to my mind, is a mercy but many readers will disagree.

For my money, however, I’m always up for a quest, as coming of age stories often are. This story is indeed a pilgrimage (as the title implies), a journey to the truth, or at least, as much of the truth as those among the quick can provide. As for literal trips: a story within the story is set at a hot spring in rustic Oita prefecture and our hero goes over the top on a Narita-Helsinki flight to interview one of the high school friends who is now a potter in the Finnish capital. Murakami effectively conveys places, both physical and mental. Well-rendered are the scenes of Tazaki in the Finnish pizzeria and in Shinjuku station watching the trains leave on overnights to Matsumoto. Also very well done was the creepy Nagoya office of his turncoat-friend who became a New Age Business Swami.

Murakami also has a didactic purpose. He wants the reader to sympathize with the characters, to identify their nuances and be tolerant of their decisions, and then to extend this skill into real life, to understand where friends, family and colleagues are coming from. He also discourages getting into ruts, just going through the motions of work, exercise, sleep, work, exercise, sleep, work, exercise, sleep. His message is be fair, be brave, build your confidence by taking risks, get out of your comfort zone. This advice is nothing new but no less effective just because eternally true.

Lastly, as usual, Murakami is always into music. So to prime yourself for reading this novel, these two pieces: Round Midnight and Franz Liszt's Le mal du pays.

Fiction: click the title to go the review

Nonfiction: click the title to read review

A Strange Tale from East of the River and Other Stories - Nagai Kafu

Anthology of Japanese Literature: From the Earliest Era to the Mid-Nineteenth Century – Donald Keene (editor)

I am a Cat II – Natsume Sōseki

The Devil’s Disciple – Hamao Shiro

The Gate - Natsume Soseki

Kappa – Akutagawa Ryunosuke

Kokoro – Natsume Sōseki

Modern Japanese Literature: An Anthology – Donald Keene

Modern Japanese Stories – edited by Ivan Morris

Norwegian Wood- Haruki Murakami