Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

by Haruki Murakami

FROM JULY OF his sophomore year in college until the following January, all Tsukuru Tazaki could think about was dying.

Everything about him was middling, pallid, lacking in color.

‘If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.’

There are certain thoughts that, no matter what, you have to keep inside.

‘Ideas are like beards. Men don’t have them until they grow up. Somebody said that, but I can’t remember who.’

First he was given a name. Then consciousness and memory developed, and, finally, ego. But everything began with his name.

#Borges

‘The cook hates the waiter, and they both hate the customer,’ Haida said. ‘A line from the Arnold Wesker play The Kitchen. People whose freedom is taken away always end up hating somebody. Right? I know I don’t want to live like that.’