Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

by Haruki Murakami

And aside from Tsukuru Tazaki, they had another small, coincidental point in common: their last names all contained a color. 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.” Tazaki was the only last name that did not have a color in its meaning. From the very beginning this fact made him feel a little bit left out.

He was pretty good-looking, and sometimes people even told him so, but what they really meant was that he had no particular defects to speak of. Sometimes, when he looked at his face in the mirror, he detected an incurable boredom.

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.” Sara looked directly into his eyes. “If nothing else, you need to remember that. You can’t erase history, or change it. It would be like destroying yourself.”

Jealousy—at least as far as he understood it from his dream—was the most hopeless prison in the world. Jealousy was not a place he was forced into by someone else, but a jail in which the inmate entered voluntarily, locked the door, and threw away the key. And not another soul in the world knew he was locked inside. Of course if he wanted to escape, he could do so. The prison was, after all, his own heart. But he couldn’t make that decision. His heart was as hard as a stone wall. This was the very essence of jealousy.

In any case, the boy named Tsukuru Tazaki had died. In the savage darkness he’d breathed his last and was buried in a small clearing in the forest. Quietly, secretly, in the predawn while everyone was still fast asleep. There was no grave marker. And what stood here now, breathing, was a brand-new Tsukuru Tazaki, one whose substance had been totally replaced. But he was the only one who knew this. And he didn’t plan to tell.

“I wonder if what Voltaire meant wasn’t ideas as much as meditation,” Tsukuru said. The man inclined his head a fraction. “Pain is what gives rise to meditation. It has nothing to do with age, let alone beards.”

“Franz Liszt’s ‘Le mal du pays.’ It’s from his Years of Pilgrimage suite ‘Year 1: Switzerland.’ ” “ ‘Le mal du …’?” “ ‘Le mal du pays.’ It’s French. Usually it’s translated as ‘homesickness,’ or ‘melancholy.’ If you put a finer point on it, it’s more like ‘a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape.’ It’s a hard expression to translate accurately.”

“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.”

Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. So said Voltaire, the realist.”

“Everything has boundaries. The same holds true with thought. You shouldn’t fear boundaries, but you also should not be afraid of destroying them. That’s what is most important if you want to be free: respect for and exasperation with boundaries. What’s really important in life is always the things that are secondary. That’s about all I can say.”

No matter how quiet and conformist a person’s life seems, there’s always a time in the past when they reached an impasse. A time when they went a little crazy. I guess people need that sort of stage in their lives.”

“Each individual has their own unique color, which shines faintly around the contours of their body. Like a halo. Or a backlight.

You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them.

Talent is like a container. You can work as hard as you want, but the size will never change. It’ll only hold so much water and no more.”

The pain he’d felt in his heart didn’t stem from jealousy. Tsukuru knew what jealousy was like. He’d experienced it very vividly once, back in that dream, and the feeling remained with him even now. He knew how suffocating, how hopeless that sensation could be. But the pain he was feeling now was different. All he felt was sorrow, as if he’d been abandoned at the bottom of a deep, dark pit. That’s all it was—sorrow. That, and simple physical pain. He actually found this comforting. What hurt him most wasn’t the fact that Sara was walking down the street holding hands with another man. Or the possibility that she might be going to sleep with the man. Of course it pained him to imagine her undressing and getting into bed with someone else. It took great effort to wipe that mental picture from his mind. But Sara was a thirty-eight-year-old, independent woman, single and free. She had her own life, just as Tsukuru had his. She had the right to be with whomever she liked, wherever she wanted, to do whatever she wanted. What really shocked him, though, was how happy she looked. When she talked with that man, her whole face lit up. She had never showed such an unguarded expression when she was with Tsukuru, not once. With him, she always maintained a cool, controlled look. More than anything else, that’s what tore, unbearably, at his heart.

“Some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language.”

The human heart is like a night bird. Silently waiting for something, and when the time comes, it flies straight toward it.

“There are all kinds of things we have to deal with in life,” Eri finally said. “And one thing always seems to connect with another. You try to solve one problem, only to find that another one you hadn’t anticipated arises instead. It’s not that easy to get free of them. That’s true for you—and for me, too.” “You’re right, it’s not easy to get free of them. But that doesn’t mean we should leave them hanging, unresolved,” Tsukuru said. “You can put a lid on memory, but you can’t hide history. That’s what my girlfriend said.”

But I do think that sometimes a certain kind of dream can be even stronger than reality.

The past became a long, razor-sharp skewer that stabbed right through his heart. Silent silver pain shot through him, transforming his spine to a pillar of ice. The pain remained, unabated. He held his breath, shut his eyes tight, enduring the agony.

And in that moment, he was finally able to accept it all. In the deepest recesses of his soul, Tsukuru Tazaki understood. One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility. There is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss. That is what lies at the root of true harmony.

“You’re just saying how you felt. That’s different from making excuses.”

No matter how honestly you open up to someone, there are still things you cannot reveal.

“We survived. You and I. And those who survive have a duty. Our duty is to do our best to keep on living. Even if our lives are not perfect.”

“Let’s say you are an empty vessel. So what? What’s wrong with that?” Eri said. “You’re still a wonderful, attractive vessel. And really, does anybody know who they are? So why not be a completely beautiful vessel? The kind people feel good about, the kind people want to entrust with precious belongings.”

Tsukuru Tazaki had nowhere he had to go. This was like a running theme of his life. He had no place he had to go to, no place to come back to. He never did, and he didn’t now. The only place for him was where he was now.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time.