Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

by Haruki Murakami

Making love was a joining, a connection between

one person and another. You receive something, and you also have to give.

you

could do about it.” “I don’t get

“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.”

Each lost in their own thoughts.

There are certain thoughts that, no matter what, you have to keep inside. And it was those kinds of thoughts that ran through Tsukuru’s head as he rode the train home.

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.

“Pain is what gives rise to meditation.

“It means leaving behind your physical body. Leaving the cage of your physical flesh, breaking free of the chains, and letting pure logic soar free. Giving a natural life to logic. That’s the core of free thought.”

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

Haida had an opinion on everything, and was always able to logically argue his perspective. The more time Tsukuru spent with this younger friend, the deeper his respect grew. Yet Tsukuru couldn’t understand why Haida was drawn to him, or was even interested in him. But they enjoyed each other’s company so much that time spent bantering just flew by.

sometimes Tsukuru longed for a girlfriend. He wanted to hold a woman close, caress her body,

inhale the scent of ...

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.”

“At the point when you agree to take on death, you gain an extraordinary capacity. A special power, you could call it. Perceiving the colors that people emit is merely one function of that power, but at the root of it all is an ability to expand your consciousness. You’re able to push open what Aldous Huxley calls ‘the doors of perception.’ Your perception becomes pure and unadulterated. Everything around you becomes clear, like the fog lifting. You have an omniscient view of the world and see things you’ve never seen before.”

having that sort of connection, well, it’s nothing short of miraculous.”

“You need to come face-to-face with the past, not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up, independent professional.

But I never felt—swept away, overpowered by desire for any of them.”

It was reality, but a reality imbued with all the qualities of a dream. A different sphere of reality, where—at a special time and place—imagination had been set free.

He could feel the warmth and softness of Shiro’s vagina, as if it were the afterglow of actual sex.

And he still couldn’t grasp the boundary between dream and imagination, between what was imaginary and what was real.

transformed his daily life into something much richer and more colorful.

He missed their conversations, and Haida’s light, distinctive laugh. The music he liked, the books he sometimes read aloud from, his take on current events, his unique

sense of humor, his spot-on quotations, the food he prepared, the coffee he brewed. Haida’s absence left behind b...

There must be something in him, something fundamental, that disenchanted people. “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki,” he said aloud. I basically have nothing to offer to others. If you think about it, I don’t even have anything to offer myself.

This was mere conjecture, of course. Baseless, unreasonable speculation.

taut body.

She was bright and attractive, and while she didn’t provide intellectual stimulation like Haida, she had a cheerful, open personality, plenty of curiosity, and was an enjoyable conversationalist. She enjoyed making love, too, and being

with her taught him much about women’s bodies.

As he made love to her, he tried hard to think of nothing beyond her and her body.

“We live in a pretty apathetic age, yet we’re surrounded by an enormous amount of information about other people. If you feel like it, you can easily gather that information about them. Having said that, we still hardly know anything about people.”

“I’ve always seen myself as an empty person, lacking color and identity. Maybe that was my role in the group. To be empty.”

“I was married once, when I was twenty-seven. But I got divorced after a year and a half. I’ve been alone ever since. It’s easier being single. You don’t waste a lot of time. Are you the same way?”

“No, not really. I’d like to get married. I actually have too much spare time on my hands. I’ve just never met the right person.”

rain drum against the window,

but he was powerfully drawn to her. And each time he saw her, this desire only grew. He was ready to sacrifice in order to have her. It was unusual for him to feel such a strong, raw emotion.

When I looked in the mirror, it felt like I’d been put inside a container that wasn’t me.

a stage where I had to kind of lose my mind for a while, where my looks and my body had to undergo a metamorphosis.

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

Tsukuru had the feeling, though, that this closeness would have been short-lived. An unavoidable fissure would have grown between what he and Eri wanted from their lives.

they would have reached a fork and gone off in separate directions. Without fighting, without hurting each other, naturally, calmly.

“You’re not a simple person. You just try to think you are.”

But such bliss couldn’t last forever. At some point paradise would be lost.

But there are countless things in the world for which affection is not enough. Life is long, and sometimes

cruel.

Die in reality, or die figuratively—there isn’t much difference between the two.

He longed for her more than he could say. It was a wonderful thing to be able to truly want someone like this—the feeling was so real, so overpowering.