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Publication date: 2013
WCRG meeting: 5 December 2018
Rating: 6.4
Thank you to all who meet, or submitted their observations, to our meeting last Wednesday, where we discussed Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.
Initially, several readers found the start of the book to be sterile; ‘lost in translation’ was one observation, possibly because Murakami writes for an American audience, any translation is going to be challenging, and may compromise the integrity of the book or the message it conveys. Once we started to unpack the book, more subtle threads were uncovered. The use of colour has significant meaning in Japanese culture, and Tsukurs’s friends were identified as follows, white which means mourning (Shirane); black –mystery (Kurono); red-passion (Akamatsu) and blue fidelity (Oumi). Whereas his name had no colour in it. The air of melancholy running through the text reflected Tsukuru’s pilgrimage, through friendships as they came and went in his life. This was noted as being a theme of other books Murakami has written, but he does do ‘melancholy’ well. The use of elaborate similes for Tsukuru’s mental state pepper the novel.
The curious phrase in the title: “Years of Pilgrimage,” is a reference, to Franz Liszt’s celebrated piano works about his travels around Europe: his Années de pèlerinage (S.160, S.161, S.163). The specific part of the Années de pèlerinage, Tsukuru Tazaki, refers to throughout the novel is number 8 of the first year of pilgrimage: Le Mal de Pays (Homesickness), or as another character in the book, Haida (name means gray), translates it “a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape.”
(Another book by Murkami is Norwegian Wood which begins with Toru Watanabe, a middle-aged man who feels overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia as he listens to the song 'Norwegian Wood' by the Beatles. Hearing this song sends Toru tumbling eighteen years into the past to a time when he was still a college kid - sound familiar?!)
Generally, the group felt the book never reached it is potential, several story lines started but the themes drifted off and were never revisited. The storyline of a young man seeking answers to his abandonment by his friends as teenagers, with his subsequent visits to see them ‘back home’ sixteen years later, (why did he wait so long), led to some interesting but mainly unsatisfactory stories. Many in the group enjoyed the descriptions of Tsukuru’s trip to Finland, a complete adventure, the images of the silver birches was evocative. His relationship with Sara, the catalyst, to his pilgrimage was felt to be shallow and manipulative, what were her motives?
Thank you to all who meet, or submitted their observations, to our meeting last Wednesday, where we discussed Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami.
Initially, several readers found the start of the book to be sterile; ‘lost in translation’ was one observation, possibly because Murakami writes for an American audience, any translation is going to be challenging, and may compromise the integrity of the book or the message it conveys. Once we started to unpack the book, more subtle threads were uncovered. The use of colour has significant meaning in Japanese culture, and Tsukurs’s friends were identified as follows, white which means mourning (Shirane); black –mystery (Kurono); red-passion (Akamatsu) and blue fidelity (Oumi). Whereas his name had no colour in it. The air of melancholy running through the text reflected Tsukuru’s pilgrimage, through friendships as they came and went in his life. This was noted as being a theme of other books Murakami has written, but he does do ‘melancholy’ well. The use of elaborate similes for Tsukuru’s mental state pepper the novel.
The curious phrase in the title: “Years of Pilgrimage,” is a reference, to Franz Liszt’s celebrated piano works about his travels around Europe: his Années de pèlerinage (S.160, S.161, S.163). The specific part of the Années de pèlerinage, Tsukuru Tazaki, refers to throughout the novel is number 8 of the first year of pilgrimage: Le Mal de Pays (Homesickness), or as another character in the book, Haida (name means gray), translates it “a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape.”
(Another book by Murkami is Norwegian Wood which begins with Toru Watanabe, a middle-aged man who feels overwhelmed by a sense of nostalgia as he listens to the song 'Norwegian Wood' by the Beatles. Hearing this song sends Toru tumbling eighteen years into the past to a time when he was still a college kid - sound familiar?!)
Generally, the group felt the book never reached it is potential, several story lines started but the themes drifted off and were never revisited. The storyline of a young man seeking answers to his abandonment by his friends as teenagers, with his subsequent visits to see them ‘back home’ sixteen years later, (why did he wait so long), led to some interesting but mainly unsatisfactory stories. Many in the group enjoyed the descriptions of Tsukuru’s trip to Finland, a complete adventure, the images of the silver birches was evocative. His relationship with Sara, the catalyst, to his pilgrimage was felt to be shallow and manipulative, what were her motives?
The group awarded the book a score of 6.4 out of a potential 10.
