Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the thirteenth novel by author Haruki Murakami, first published in Japanese in 2013 and in English only a year later in 2014. It was released three years after IQ84, Murakami’s longest ever novel yet, with more than 900 pages total. The book was released in English by Philip Gabriel, another one of Murakami’s frequent translators.
Unlike the majority of Murakami’s works (including both long and short-form novels alike), Tsukuru Tazaki dials down on the surrealism and mystique that has often characterized Murakami’s writing, choosing instead to focus on a simpler narrative. The story follows the perspective of the titular Tazaki, a 36-year-old railway engineer who has been constantly plagued wondering why his group of high school friends cut all ties with him sixteen years ago. Now a grown man, he is convinced by his girlfriend Sara to seek the truth, and so he decides to go on a quest to mend his relationships with his former friends and get to the bottom of the mystery.
Although this novel is well-written overall, and I can definitely understand why Murakami would choose to write something this simple (especially given that he’s finished an absolutely massive plot-layered story years earlier), for a novel that took three years to write, it’s rather underwhelming. I was excited to see a Murakami protagonist who actually wasn’t a loner (or at least wasn’t formerly a loner), but compared to his other main characters, Tazaki falls rather flat, though only in comparison. Moreover, despite Murakami being a brilliant writer, I felt that much of the writing in this novel was rather shallow, and it was even more disappointing that he chose to leave most of this story’s mysteries unresolved and ambiguous, which is strange considering the great lengths Tazaki goes through in his attempt to solve them.
In conclusion, Tsukuru Tazaki isn’t a bad novel by any means, and if you’ve never read Murakami before, you may enjoy it, but compared to his best works (and even his other novels in this category) it is noticeably weaker in both style and presentation. Ultimately, whether you choose to read it or not is up to you.
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