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Pilgrimage flows with Murakami's unique literary power

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage By Haruki Murakami
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage By Haruki Murakami

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage By Haruki Murakami (Knopf), $25.95

In this post-literate age, it is hard to imagine a writer of literary fiction mattering so much as Japanese author Haruki Murakami seems to. In an age when selling 5,000 copies of a book in a week can land an author on The New York Times best-seller list, Murakami's latest book, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, sold more than 500,000 copies in Japan in its first week. In this country, Knopf released 150,000 copies of the novel last week. Before it was released, advance orders had pushed it to third place on Amazon.com's best-seller list.

This is heartening -- and a little strange. I love Murakami's work, but I'm surprised it is popular, especially in this country.

His works do not resolve easily to quick synopsis -- they aren't cinematic in the way most popular thrillers seem to be these days. He's an experimental novelist who works in the white territories between fable and realism, with lots of imported symbols (such as Johnnie Walker, the anthropomorphic Scotch logo, in Kafka on the Shore). His books can be read as sustained allegories or ineluctable nightmares studded with (usually Western) pop-culture references. His characters aren't superheroes, but generally decent, unremarkable people compelled to undergo philosophical quests. He's no young adult scribbler; his moral poetry contains 50 million shades of gray.

Still, he's popular, well-bought if not always so well-read. (Actually, I know lots of people who do read Murakami. We have loaned out many of his novels.) And his popularity gives me license to write about his work.

It's convenient that Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage may be Murakami's most accessible novel since 1987's Norwegian Wood, in that, unlike his recent masterpieces 1Q84 and Kafka on the Shore, it tells a story that is very much rooted in a real world, one populated by soulless corporate motivational speakers, high school cliques and abandoned friendships. At its center is a typically unassuming Murakami protagonist, Tsukuru, a calm and reflective engineer whose lifelong dream has been to build train stations. But since Japan's railroad system is long established, he has to content himself with rebuilding and refurbishing existing stations. He doesn't mind so much.

Tsukuru is from Nagoya, a large if provincial city, but he has made his home in Tokyo since his university days. Now, at 36, he's involved with the first real adult relationship of his life, with his first real girlfriend, Sara, a woman with whom he can imagine living the rest of his life. But she senses something isn't quite right with Tsukuru. And she's right.

In high school, Tsukuru was part of a group of inseparable friends -- all of whom, except for him, happened to have colors in their names: "The two boys' last names were Akamatsu -- which means 'red pine' -- and Oumi -- 'blue sea'; the girls' family names were Shirane -- 'white root' -- and Kurono -- 'black field,'" Murakami writes. "Tazaki was the only last name that did not have a color in its meaning. From the very beginning this fact made [Tsukuru] feel a little bit left out."

They grew very close during their late teens, and all but Tsukuru, who needed to go to Tokyo to pursue his engineering studies, remained in Nagoya. Still, he went back often to visit and maintain the integrity of the group. Then one day there was a rupture, and for reasons unknown to him, Tsukuru was expelled from the group. They would have nothing more to do with him. He was not to bother them.

He was bewildered, but there was nothing to be done. He accepted it and entered a bleak time. He stopped caring about life. He could have died.

Sara persuades Tsukuru to excavate his past, to travel back to Nagoya to confront Akamatsu and Oumi, and to Finland to see Kurono. We get just a glimpse of Murakami's tendency toward magical realism with the suggestion that Shirane's unsolved murder -- which occurred a few years before the main action of the book -- might have had something to do with the group's falling apart.

Gradually Tsukuru puts together some of the pieces, accomplishing something like a psychic reintegration. But because this is a Murakami novel, not everything is resolved, and the ending is ambivalent.

It's fascinating to me how Murakami -- who has translated novels from English to Japanese -- works with his main translator, Philip Gabriel, who did the honors here, and Jay Rubin. Somehow they achieve a hypnotic effect, a fugue state that feels less like reading than dreaming.

This isn't epic Murakami, but it's compelling, remarkable fiction, a quietly powerful and haunting human-scale book that lingers and resonates. Readers used to police procedurals and thrillers may feel uncomfortable with the slightly atonal quality of the final, trembling chord. You can't read Murakami for what happens next. You have to read him for the way word follows word, the way banality cedes to beauty.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style on 08/17/2014

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