From July of his sophomore year of college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying. He turned twenty during this time, but this special watershed—becoming an adult—meant nothing.
So begins Murakami’s modern Japanese fairy tale presenting Tsukuru Tazaki’s existential quest for the mature self, set within the sprawling megalopolis of Tokyo, rather than the forest primeval. That Tsukuru is the hero of this quest is made plain by his attributes and choices, and by our intimate acquaintance with his inner life within the crucible of loss and grief. We meet him in a flashback to the aftermath of his unexplained expulsion from a close friendship among five schoolmates, a crisis that alienates and disorients him, initiating long years of pilgrimage.
Sixteen years later, in the now of the story, Tsukuru is a deeply wounded thirty-six year old who has remained emotionally isolated, with the exception of one brief intimacy. A budding romance with a woman named Sara provides the impetus for Tsukuru to finally confront his former friends and to heal from their rejection. Successive chapters move fluidly between past and present, as Tsukuru undertakes a quest to unravel the mysteries and misperceptions of his experience.
Seen through the lens of his adolescent idyll, his friends are mere types without real depth or individuality. Tsukuru recalls that the other members of the group were called by monikers derived from their family names, which all included colors. Each of them played a specific role: Ao (Blue), the jock; Aka (Red), the intellectual; Shiro (White), the sweet young girl and Kuro (Black), the sarcastic wit. Though Tsukuru views his “colorless” family name as symbolizing his lack of personality, in reality it signals his uniqueness. His given name (“to make" or "to build”) suggests his character's active potential, as does his interest in engineering train stations. Tsukuru is fascinated by people on the move.
We learn that Tsukuru left Nagoya after high school, moving to Tokyo to attend a prestigious university--unlike his friends who chose to remain in their hometown, at least for a time. Though the relocation represented an assertion of Tsukuru's independent self, his separation from the group remained incomplete during his freshman year; he visited as often as possible, in order to reconnect. Like other fairy tale heroes, he had to be forced out into the world; his ejection from the group severed the last ties to his childhood.
Again reminiscent of familiar folkloric characters, Tsukuru wandered in a lonely, dreamlike state during years of exile, until he was ready to be awakened by an invitation to adult relationship. Significantly, it is Sara who finally catalyzes his quest for healing and full maturation. Both sense the possibilities for the two of them; there is the potential to create a lasting bond—in fairy tale terms, a marriage. But Sara recognizes that Tsukuru must resolve lingering issues from his past in order to open himself to true intimacy. A mature and independent woman, she will accept no less from her partner.
Flashbacks to past personal connections show how unready Tsukuru has been to enter into such a relationship. In retrospect, he recognizes that the survival of his high school group precluded the development of romantic couples. The odd number of members seemed designed to do just this. Tsukuru never did act on his strong attraction to both girls from the group, though he continues to have erotic dreams about them into his mid-thirties, and retains a fascination for a piano piece that Shiro often played.
A brief, intense friendship with a younger man named Haida (“gray field”), while Tsukuru was still at university, was an attempt to assuage Tsukuru’s desire for a romantic partner. The equivalency was made clear in a sexual dream that began with the girls, and ended with Haida. While Haida may have been attracted to Tsukuru, there was no physical intimacy between them. It was a woman’s body Tsukuru longed to hold in his arms. Tsukuru’s friendship with Haida was almost an affair with another version of himself; both were young, unattached engineers who enjoyed daily swimming and lengthy philosophical discussions.
Prompted by Sara, Tsukuru finally faces his terrible fear of rejection, and at last learns what really happened so many years before. He also discovers what his friends thought of him at the time, a markedly different perspective from the one he had suspected. This new awareness of himself as others see him is paralleled by his dawning recognition of his friends as individuals, rather than types. He comes to understand that the group had to dissolve for each member to achieve maturity.
When Tsukuru meets with Kuro, the end goal of his quest is made explicit. Kuro has literally traveled the farthest distance from their childhood home of Nagoya in order to establish her own life. Like Sara, she represents a fully differentiated, mature adult. The enviable domestic harmony glimpsed in her home offers a tantalizing vision of Tsukuru’s future, should he choose intimacy with Sara. Kuro has established a métier in which she makes things (like Tsukuru), as well as a successful marriage and family. “There are some things,” Tsukuru reflects as he regards her womanly contours, “that can only be expressed through a woman’s form.”
Like Tsukuru himself, the novel is deceptively understated. On reflection, the tale opens into the dimension of myth, balancing the universal drama of maturation with the particularities of Murakami’s setting. This hero’s journey is specifically Japanese in detail.
While teaching high school in Yokohama, I observed that our students often had sibling relationships with each other, and that school groups resembled families. In Japanese society, which so values belonging and conformity, uniforms and the near universal adoption of similar accessories disguise the uniqueness of each individual. School clothes give way to identical adult garb, whether actual uniforms or the de facto uniform of the salaryman. Tsukuru Tazaki is a sort of Japanese everyman, progressing through typical (if idealized) adolescent relationships and the ordinary milestones of life to an unremarkable adulthood in which he moves within a sea of identical-looking commuters to and from work each day. His unique qualities remain for a time hidden, even to himself.
The characteristic Japanese reserve, the tendency to leave deep feelings unspoken, is the engine of the novel. Neither the long years of isolation, nor the lacunae and misperceptions crucial to the plot could endure in a social context where people openly express themselves. Though we all have to individuate in order to realize maturity, it is only in breaking through our aloneness and entering into open and vulnerable intimacy that we penetrate the deep, existential mystery that is the quest for the self.