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.

Crossing that threshold between life and death would have been easier than swallowing down a slick, raw egg.

Before him lay a huge, dark abyss that ran straight through to the earth’s core.

The reason why death had such a hold on Tsukuru Tazaki was clear. One day his four closest friends, the friends he’d known for a long time, announced that they did not want to see him, or talk with him, ever again. It was a sudden, decisive declaration, with no room for compromise. They gave no explanation, not a word, for this harsh pronouncement. And Tsukuru didn’t dare ask.

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.

The person here now, the one he saw in the mirror, might at first glance resemble Tsukuru Tazaki, but it wasn’t actually him. It was merely a container that, for the sake of convenience, was labeled with the same name—but its contents had been replaced.

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

“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.”

The world isn’t that easily turned upside down, Haida replied. It’s people who are turned upside down.

You become intuition. It’s at once a wonderful sensation and a hopeless one, because, almost at the last minute, you realize how shallow and superficial your life has been. And you shudder at the fact that up to that point you’ve been able to stand such a life.”

As the rush-hour surge finally receded, Tsukuru Tazaki slowly got to his feet, boarded one of the cars, and went home. The pain was still there, but now he knew there was something he had to do.

As he watched, Tsukuru’s mind grew still and tranquil. A quiet feeling, like a frozen tree on a windless winter night. But there was little pain mixed in.

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

Still no words came to him. Tsukuru silently followed her gaze to the surface of the lake. It was only later, after he boarded the direct flight back to Narita and had buckled his seat belt, that the words came, the words he should have said. The right words always seemed to come too late.

Not everything was lost in the flow of time. That’s what Tsukuru should have said to Eri when he said goodbye at the lakeside in Finland. But at that point, he couldn’t put it into words.

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.