Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami

Aug 2014 · Random House

About this eBook

A mesmerising mystery story about friendship from the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84

Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning ‘red pine’, and Oumi, ‘blue sea’, while the girls’ names were Shirane, ‘white root’, and Kurono, ‘black field’. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it.

One day Tsukuru Tazaki’s friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.

Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

Ratings and reviews

Following 'After Dark' & 'IQ84' Murakami's poor run of form continues. He's really is just phoning them in. This is a slight novel in terms of length and content, yet still contains lots of superfluous padding e.g. the tendency of Finnish croissants to be too sweet or the details of Shinjuku station. Thin plot which isn't well resolved and depends on an unrealistic absence of communication and the main character's complete passivity. Could and should have been a short story.

Loved reading the story, it was captivating and magical and relaxing and I could relate so much. The ending was a bit disappointing, probably because I myself was expecting some kind of miracle, but I guess that's how life is!

I really enjoyed this book. Whilst I understand some people wishing that a few of the big questions were answered, that would have overpowered the books theme of 'friendship' and left it something very different.

About the author

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was 29 and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.