Murakami goes oddly normal

I’ve had this on my shelf a while and I finally got around to feeling like reading something weird. Interesting thing is though, this novel is actually not, at least compared to a lot of Murakami’s other works. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage has a lot of the expected Murakami elements, such as a main character in some kind of life rut, a sort of mysterious female who helps him (that’s Sara), some unusual dreams, and a trip somewhere for literal and self-discovery (in this case, Finland).

I think the least Murakami thing about the book is Tsukuru himself. He’s actually moderately successful in both his work and love lives. He’s got a job that caters to his youthful dreams of working with travel stations, and he’s recently started dating Sara, who seems about perfect for him, helping him work out the problems of his past that haunt him. He also never makes spaghetti, which seems to be a thing in Murakami novels.

The big mystery that has bothered Tsukuru for 20 years is the question of why his tight knit group of high school friends suddenly cast him out after their first year of college. With help and prodding from Sara, he goes looking for those friends to ask what went wrong. He never felt secure in the group in the first place because all the others (2 girls and 2 guys) had last names related to colors, while he does not. Of the 3 he finds, he learns that none of them really felt right about what happened, and that there had been a big misunderstanding, part of which can never be resolved. Saying more would be spoilers. What’s not spoilers is that Tsukuru also finds out that while the group was in high school there were some unspoken, unrequited love feelings that were never revealed or realized among members of the group. Tsukuru himself admits he felt some form of attraction to the 2 girls, which explains the expected Murakami dream weirdness.

It seems like in every Murakami novel I’ve read, there has to be some strange dream that somehow impacts reality, and often it involves sex. That’s every bit as true here as in other novels, but the actual physical impact of the dreams in the real world is far less strange than in other places. Tsukuru basically figures that the sex dreams featuring his 2 high school friends are a result of his unresolved issues concerning the group and how they split up, and it’s true. It’s also true that there’s a slight hint of an impact on reality, but because of {spoilers}, the possibility is irrelevant to Tsukuru’s and his friends’ presents and futures.

During the search and discovery process, Tsukuru also reflects on other relationships that he’s had, including a college friendship with a younger man who suddenly disappears from his life with no explanation. Tsukuru also has to figure out his feelings about Sara, especially since he realizes that they might not be exclusive with each other. This is probably the one thing I didn’t like about Sara: she refuses to answer right away when asked point blank “are you seeing someone else besides me?” And Tsukuru is sort of ok with waiting. He’s actually quite anxious to see her again, but more for another reason than her answer. If this had happened anywhere else but the end of the book, I might have been ok with that, but so close to the conclusion it just bothered me about her. No one’s perfect, but still, she was so close up to that point.

Overall, I was surprised, but I still really enjoyed this book. Maybe more than some of the others I’ve read. If you don’t like existential weirdness, you may not like Murakami, but you might try this one anyways, because he is a master of character and narrative, and everyone should at least experience Murakami once. This wouldn’t be a bad way to test him out.