Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Murakami)

Book Reviews
This is the kind of blah surrealism for which Mr. Murakami is so beloved by his fans, who will go to any lengths to justify why a minor book like Colorless Tsukuru still has the author’s special je ne sais quoi. The dreaminess of the passage is its stylistic trademark, but there are other, less woozy ways to say that bitter experience toughens Tsukuru into a new man
Janet Maslin - New York Times


This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it; at times, it seems like a prequel to a whole other narrative. The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted…Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another…The book reveals another side of Murakami, one not so easy to pin down. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation. A shedding of Murakami skin.
Patti Smith - New York Times Book Review


[A] remarkable novel [that] takes us on a spellbinding descent through the rings of hell in Tsukuru Tazaki’s young life.... A virtual symphony of literary and musical referents. Murakami’s wizardry lies in his ability to pack all that cultural and spiritual resonance into a book that is as tightly wound as a Dashiell Hammett mystery. . . . Murakami can herd the troubles of a very large world and still mind a few precious details. He may be taking us deeper and deeper into a fractured modernity and its uneasy inhabitants, but he is ever alert to minds and hearts, to what it is, precisely, that they feel and see, and to humanity’s abiding and indomitable spirit.... A deeply affecting novel, not only for the dark nooks and crannies it explores, but for the magic that seeps into its characters’ subconsciouses, for the lengths to which they will go to protect or damage one another, for the brilliant characterizations it delivers along the way.... A page-turner with intervals of lapidary prose and dazzling human comprehension.
Marie Arana - Washington Post


[A] feeling...lingered with me for days after I read Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, a feeling of having experienced some extreme vividness, some extreme force of emotion. I'm still not sure exactly what it was. "An encounter with genius" may be the answer.... Murakami is like Edward Hopper or Arvo Part, his simplicities earned, his exactingly artful techniques permitting him a higher kind of artlessness.... [Colorless Tsukuru is a] sincere, soft-spoken story.... There is an intoxicating mood of nostalgia.... Tsukuru's pilgrimage will never end, because he is moving constantly away from his destination, which is his old self. This is a narrow poignancy, but a powerful one, and Murakami is its master. Perhaps that's why he has come to speak not just for his thwarted nation, but for so many of us who love art—since it's only there, alas, in novels such as this one, that we're allowed to live twice.
Charles Finch - Chicago Tribune


[Murakamai] has opened his vision, his sensibility, to reflect the distances implicit in being alive. . . . More than just a story but rather a meditation on everything the narrative provokes. How do we connect, or reconnect, to those around us but also to the very essence of ourselves? Where, in the flatness of contemporary society—which in this novel, as in so much of his work, Murakami evokes with a masterful understatement—do we find some point of intersection, some lasting depth? . . . There is a rawness, a vulnerability, to these characters, a sense that the surface of the world is thin, and the border between inner and outer life, between existence as we know it and something far more elusive, is easily effaced.
David L. Ulin - Los Angeles Times


Bold and colorful threads of fiction blur smoothly together to form the muted white of an almost ordinary realism. Like J.M. Coetzee, Murakami smoothly interlaces allegorical meanings with everyday particulars of contemporary social reality. The shadows cast may be larger than life, but the figures themselves feel stirringly human.... This new novel chronicles a spiritual quest that might also be a love story. But here the author strips away the magical quavers of reality and the mind-bending plot structures that have become hallmarks of his work.... Readers find themselves propelled along by the ebb and flow of an internal logic that feels as much like a musical progression as it does an unfolding of events. The steady calm of the prose, the ambient rhythms of recurring motifs like Fraz Liszt's "Le Mal du Pays," and the close attention to repetitive patterns in characters' lives bring readers into a carefully measured cadence like that of Tsukuru's pared-down lifestyle.... Thanks to Philip Gabriel's discerning translation into subtle yet artful language, the novel[‘s]...ease and obviousness convey an internal complexity that you ‘get’ without realizing it.... Tsukuru's situation will resonate with anyone who feels adrift in this age of Google and Facebook.
Christopher Weinberger - San Francisco Chronicle


(Starred review.) This is a book for both the new and experienced reader.... The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted… Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another…. Incurably restive, ambiguous and valiantly struggling toward a new level of maturation.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Hypnotically fascinating.... A journey of immense magnitude, both physically...and, of course, metaphysically, as Tazaki attempts to make sense of his own inner world and the dreams that shape his other dimension.... In the end, Murakami writes love stories, all the more tender and often tragic for their exploration of the multiple realities in which is lovers live.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Murakami turns in a trademark story that blends the commonplace with the nightmarish in a Japan full of hollow men.... Murakami writes with the same murky sense of time that characterized 1Q84, but this book [is] short and haunting.... The reader will enjoy watching Murakami play with color symbolism down to the very last line of the story.... Another tour de force from Japan’s greatest living novelist.
Kirkus Reviews