Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

by Haruki Murakami

“But you can’t go back now? To that orderly, harmonious, intimate place?” He thought about this, though there was no need to. “That place doesn’t exist anymore,” he said quietly.

He was alone in two senses of the word. He was also a foreigner, the people around him speaking a language he couldn’t understand. It was a different sense of isolation from what he normally felt in Japan. And not such a bad feeling, he decided. Being alone in two senses of the word was maybe like a double negation of isolation. In other words, it made perfect sense for him, a foreigner, to feel isolated here. There was nothing odd about it at all. The thought calmed him. He was in exactly the right place.

“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.”

“The most I can do is keep building railroad stations.”

Don’t forget—you’re the one who swam across the freezing sea at night.”

Everyone was boarding a night train, heading to a far-off destination. Tsukuru envied them. At least they had a place they needed to go to.

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.

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something—with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.