By
Lisabet Sarai
This
fortnight here at the Grip, we tackle our recurring topic “What are
you reading?” I’m always in the middle of several books, but
lately most have left me with a ho-hum feeling. When I realized that
this topic was looming, though, I decided to crack open a novel I’ve
been “saving” since I bought it
a couple of months ago: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and HisYears of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami. I’m now about
two-thirds of the way through this three hundred page volume,
certainly far enough to chronicle my feelings here.
Murakami
has been one of my favorite authors since I first read A WildSheep Chase, more than thirty years ago. I’m not alone in this
sentiment; Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki sold more than a million
copies in Japan during the first week after its release.
When
I try to analyze why I enjoy his work so much, though, I’m
left with a bit of puzzle.
One
thing that normally attracts me to an author is originality or
diversity. For instance, I love T.C. Boyle’s chameleon-like ability
to produce a wildly different type of story with each release.
Murakami’s books, in contrast, tend to be quite similar to one
another in language and tone. His characters also share many
characteristics from one book to the next. His heroes tend to be
quiet, hard working, nondescript, often lonely, men, drifting almost
anonymously through Japanese society.
Thirty-something
Tsukuru Tazaki fits this mold exactly. He lives alone in a Tokyo
condo and works as an engineer building railroad stations (which
happen to be one of his rare passions). He does his own laundry and
often cooks his own simple food, drinks alcohol sparingly, swims
regularly at the public pool for exercise and to quiet his mind. He
has never been outside Japan. He has no friends—in
fact an issue at the crux of this story—until
he meets Sara, a enigmatic woman to whom he’s strongly attracted,
but about whom he knows little.
Hardly
an alpha hero. Hardly a hero at all, by the standards of popular
literature, but quite typical of Murakami’s protagonists.
I
also admire books with intricate and beautifully constructed
structure, plots that not only provide interesting conflicts and
dramatic resolutions, but which also showcase the author’s
awareness of and ability to control the narrative. Examples that come
to mind include Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior and
Erin Morgenstern’s The Night Circus. In these books, no
detail is insignificant. Themes or events early in the novel turn out
to have profound impacts by the end.
Murakami’s
books, in contrast, meander from one event to the next, taking side
trips along the way, which may or may not turn out to be relevant to
the book as a whole. Murakami is also a jazz musician, and sometimes
his books feel like improvisations. In addition, there’s little
rise in tension. The story arc is so gradual as to be almost
undetectable.
Colorless
Tsukuru Tazaki follows this pattern, although it begins with an
emotional cataclysm. During his high school years in Nagoya, Tsukuru Tazaki
(whose first name means “the builder”) enjoyed a remarkable,
close relationship with four friends. Studious Akamatsu (“red
pine”), athletic Oumi (“blue sea”), beautiful Shirane (“white
root”), warm Kurono (“black field”) and Tsukuru were
inseparable for much of their teenage life. They spent work and play
time together; they shared experiences and ideas; they complemented
one another’s personalities. There was something intoxicating,
almost erotic about their closeness, although the relations between
the male and female members of the group were entirely platonic.
Together the five were as much of a whole as the five fingers on a
hand. Then during Tsukuru’s first year of university, the four
friends whose names include colors suddenly rejected him. They
refused to communicate with him. Furthermore, they would not tell him
the reason.
Tsukuru
almost dies as a result of this sudden amputation from the people he
loves. The shock and grief are overwhelming. He stops eating. He
sinks into grief and becomes preoccupied with death, as emotional
pain totally consumes him. Yet Murakami describes this so calmly that
the impact feels muted.
“Perhaps
he didn’t commit suicide then because he couldn’t conceive of a
method that fit the pure and intense feelings he had toward death.
But the method was beside the point. If there had been a door within
reach that led straight to death, he wouldn’t have hesitated to
push it open, without a second thought, as if it were just part of
ordinary life. For better or for worse, though, there was no such
door nearby.”
This
passage offers a sense of Murakami’s graceful, fluid style, as well
as the distance he always seems to preserve between the reader and
his characters.
The
book does have a plot. Indeed, it is in some sense a classic mystery,
as Tsukuru finally takes action to discover the truth of why his
friends spurned him. He is set upon this quest by the insightful
Sara, who recognizes that he can’t fully participate in building
his relationship with her because he’s stuck in the past, pinned
like a butterfly to an empty life by the pain of his old loss.
Still,
it’s not really the plot that’s pulling me forward in the book,
making it hard for me to stop reading at night even though I know
I’ll be sorry when the alarm clock rings the next day.
What
is it about Murakami’s work that excites me? Why am I trying to
ration this book, so as not to finish it too quickly?
One
answer lies in the richness of ideas the author explores. His
characters tend to have long, philosophical conversations full of
startling insights (which may or may not be important for the
“plot”). Murakami is interested in life, death, talent, music,
art, language, evil, logic, fate, luck, spirituality, relationships,
and the nature of reality. There’s a deep pleasure in reading these
conversations. You think, “Yes, that’s exactly right, that
captures the truth.” Or sometimes, “what a remarkable
perspective; that’s never occurred to me.” I find it difficult to
retain these insights, just as it’s hard to hold on to the details
of a dream. All you recall are the emotions. Of course, one joy of a
book (especially a print book like this one I’m reading) is the
ability to go back and re-visit favorite passages.
Murakami’s
language is beautifully precise, whether he is describing inner or
outer states of being. He has a gift for creating images that capture
the essence of his subject. As an author, I can appreciate both the
final effects and the difficulty of achieving them.
However,
the main feature that calls me back to this author’s work may be
the magic. Every one of his novels incorporates some hint of the
miraculous or the unexplained. Don’t misunderstand me; there are no
wizards or mages in Murakami’s books, no shapeshifters, blood
drinkers or demons that characterize the paranormal genre. Instead,
there are synchronicities, coincidences that defy logic, or states of
being that take the characters beyond the material world. This is
more like the magical realism that characterizes Latin American
fiction like that of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Laura Esquivel.The Latin magic is more vivid, though, portrayed in primary colors. Murakami, in contrast, describes these marvels in the same subdued and measured prose he uses for the
rest of his books.
In
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, for example, Tsukuru has a
disturbing lucid dream about his old friends as a well as a new
friend, Haida (who vanishes not long after). The dream is a harbinger
of reality, foreshadowing the reason his friends cut him off. When
Tsukuru travels to Finland, where Kurono has moved, every experience
seems edged with magic. He encounters the people he needs to assist
him on his quest.
Like
many other aspects of Murakami’s work, it’s difficult to pinpoint
exactly where the sense of magic comes from. It slips away, leaving a
memory, like the refrain of a song that sticks in your mind, whose
title you can’t recall. It’s haunting, though, creating a
persistent sense that life includes something beyond the bare
bones of physical experience. Often we can’t see this something,
but it shines through the
deceptively mundane events in Murakami’s stories, drawing the mind
and the heart.
This
is a highly academic work. My brain needs to be fully engaged any time I
sit down with it, so it's not the book I pick up with my morning
coffee, but debt is a topic that's always interested me. I'm the kind of
person who pays off their credit cards in full every month, the kind of
person who'd rather go without life's frills in favour of squirreling
money away.