Haruki Murakami: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

I have some good news, and I have some bad news.  And they are the same news, as they always are. During a moment of weakness in Sofia, Bulgaria, i made the mistake of letting my guard down and trusting the general good intentions of people.  I was rewarded with a stolen phone, and a bruised ego.  This cast a shadow over the rest of my European tour, and I suppose that's the bad news.  But the books I was reading, the online games with which I spent too many hours, and the constant flow of communication I used to numb my foolish brain disappeared with it.  That was the good news.  I suddenly had nothing but my thoughts to entertain me, and had to hunt down a few real books to keep that from driving me crazy.  I read five books in the final week of my trip, and each in its own way was exactly what I needed.

The good news and the bad news, in Literature as in everything, are the same news.  Books are often like tarot cards, not saying anything themselves--try though they might--but merely providing the vocabulary necessary for us to think about that which we already knew.  And so it is that what I take away from a given book is what I needed to receive from it (that's the good news), which may or may not have anything to do with what the book was really about (the bad news).  Books--and art, music, film, relationships, the whole spectrum of human experience--are powerless in the hands of the creator, and omniscient in the hands of the reader.  To say that they are as colorless as the title character of this book is an example of the liberty that one may and must take as a reader.  Murakami's meaning clearly has nothing to do with readership, literature, and interpretation.  But that is the thought that I went into the book with so that is the meaning I found.

And the characters in the book were manifestly not meant as allegories for people in my own life.  Even forced into those roles, they served only imperfectly.  None who know me would describe me as colorless, and yet I am.  I have very little identity of my own, and the colors people see in me are more often than not their own color, amplified and reflected.  I am not an empty vessel, tormented by a confusion about my own identity, but as I became Tazaki, I also wore this part of him.  And the answers that satisfied him also satisfied me, until I put the book down, and again became myself.