Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami (Harvill Secker, £20)
The whole story of Japan today, I sometimes think, could be told through the two master artists whose initials are HM. Hayao Miyazaki, the exquisite animator behind films like Spirited Away and, most recently, The Wind Rises, is trying, with passionate urgency, to highlight and preserve those spirits that are ever more imperilled in the Japanese countryside; his is a teeming Shinto world in which every last blade of grass is lit up with kamisama, or local deities. Haruki Murakami, by comparison, speaks for a world in which all traditional magic is gone; the characters in his novels can order pizza in Helsinki, sip “Napa Cabernet Sauvignon” at home, buy duty-free Yves Saint-Laurent ties and transport their friends with renditions of Thelonius Monk’s “Round Midnight,” but they can’t for the life of them remember who they are or where they’re going.
Both contemporaries are clearly responding to the question that has long haunted Japan: how to take in the stuff of the west without importing its values and losing one’s soul? But where Miyazaki is trying to shake his country into wakefulness, Murakami dreams up floating, hypnotic tales of sleepwalkers for whom the unreal has more life than reality. Miyazaki’s vision has the feel of the 8th century Japanese capital of Nara, near which I’ve lived for more than 20 years, where deer roam free among 1,300-year-old temples, four-story pagodas and wild plum groves. Murakami serves up the generic, mock-Californian suburb in which my apartment is located, Japanese mostly in its lack of clasically Japanese features.
Both artists, of course, have won huge global followings. These days Miyazaki’s animation studio, Studio Ghibli—whose films include Princess Mononoke and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away—is as strong a brand as Sony or Toyota. And everyone I know, from Istanbul to New Delhi, seems to be devouring Murakami (in part because his books are as easily translated—and consumed—as bottled water). But the two are coming at the issue of how to remain modern and oneself from radically opposite angles. Miyazaki’s every frame is ravishing as a Hiroshige woodcut and, though distributed by Disney, his films are loving evocations of what could only be Japan; Murakami gives voice to the global anomie of men without qualities everywhere, as befits a writer who once taught at Princeton and has translated Raymond Carver and Truman Capote into the language of Tanizaki.
Murakami’s latest novel—like all his novels—flows seamlessly, even as it moves between past and present, the world and the mind. The eponymous Tsukuru is a 36-year-old white-collar worker, living alone in a comfortable one-bedroom condo in central Tokyo, and working as a train station engineer (his one semi-passion). If he has a problem, it’s only that he’s never really known problems; he grew up with everything he could want, the child of “baby-boomer” parents, his father gliding around Nagoya in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes with tinted windows, selling real estate. Unlike those of previous generations, Tsukuru has never had to face hunger or warfare or, you could say, real life. The people around him say things like, “I don’t believe in anything. Not in logic, or illogic. Not in God, or the devil… That’s my basic problem, really. I can’t erect a decent barrier between subject and object.”
Part of Tsukuru’s predicament—not much liking his life, not really disliking it; passing his days under “a thin layer of clouds… though it did not look like rain”—is that he’s always (like every Murakami protagonist) seen himself as “an empty vessel.” Yet as the book goes on, we see that his oldest friends have always thought of him as cool and handsome and full of purpose. This disjunction between how he feels and how he’s regarded echoes the rift between the bland and friction-free surfaces of his life and the violent dreams and troubled memories that rise up from what strikes him as a “deep, inner darkness.” When, at 20, he is abruptly dropped by his four inseparable friends from school (two boys and two girls), Tsukuru feels so abandoned that he loses all will to carry on.
Murakami’s curious talent is for evoking such disconnection and drift—phrases like “airless vacuum” and “vacant attic” constantly recur—in addictively readable scenes; his narratives purr along as smoothly as a high-end Toyota, dashboard beautifully illuminated, speeding through an empty landscape on cruise-control. It’s almost as if his immersion in the surfaces he describes is what allows him to proceed with such ease; he is at one with the weightless dispassion he records. Reading him is strangely akin to walking through contemporary Japan, where every last person is courteous and smiling, but you can feel as if you’re in a world ruled by elevator music.
To a startling extent, Murakami is interested only in the private world, and those moments in which characters lose all hold on reality and tumble down rabbit holes into alternative worlds. He always notes how fit his people are, what kind of Brooks Brothers or Polo shirts they wear, how their “maroon enamel handbags” look; but the real action of the book comes through less visible effects, as Tsukuru feels he’s “swallowed a hard lump of cloud” and, 47 pages on, as if he’s “somehow able to spit out a hard lump of air that had been stuck in his chest.” We hear next to nothing about Tsukuru’s office life, the historical moment, the year in which his story takes place. It’s not hard to guess that the author behind such a character is a friendly recluse who lives alone with his wife, mostly in his imagination, and ventures out only to swim or to take long, punishing runs.
As a boy, we learn, Tsukuru had been defined almost entirely by his circle of friends, his own private model of a perfect, harmonious community; yet after he’s excommunicated by the others—for reasons he only belatedly tries to uncover—he remains stuck for 16 years until a woman, Sara Kimoto, urges him to face up to the ghosts that possess him. (Sara Kimoto is, of course, a perfect Murakami name—at once Japanese and not.) As she tells him that he (and they) can’t move forwards until he confronts his past, she might be addressing Japan itself, famous for airbrushing its history books and refusing to address its wartime demons. Yet Murakami’s gift—an intuitive one—is for suggesting such larger metaphors while still giving his story a personal ache. Tsukuru says, more than once, that he feels as if he’s tumbled off a ship late at night and is flailing around in the dark waters, alone, as the lights of the vessel recede.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the novel flares up into something closest to passion when it comes to dreams and music; indeed, near the end, Tsukuru actually dreams of playing music and suggests that “a crucial aspect of the world [could] only be explained through the medium of music.” The novel takes its title from a suite by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt called Years of Pilgrimage. The piece evokes, we’re told, “a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape.” (This is Hayao Miyazaki’s theme, too, of course, but here seen in a world of concrete and glass where pastoral scenes are painfully hard to imagine).
Murakami is, in many ways, more a musician than a novelist; he deals in effects, subliminal and non-analytical, more than in action or emotion. His sentences aspire to suggest sensations we can’t define. And where a classical realist like Orhan Pamuk addresses the east-west division in his homeland of Turkey by invoking Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust, Murakami attempts the same by constantly serving up allusions to music. In this book he refers to, among others, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas!” and the differences between Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann.) Indeed, if some of Murakami’s strongest work, such as the non-fictional Underground, explores why even the best and the brightest in modern Japan join murderous cults just so they’ll have some sense of engagement and direction, other books, like After Dark, proceed almost entirely through atmospherics; that novel is a nocturne, in effect, a piece of global jazz (its title in Japanese is Afuta Daku). Similar, perhaps, to the kind Murakami used to play in the Tokyo jazz bar he ran, Peter Cat.
This is all distinctly Japanese, insofar as it prefers images to ideas, and tremors, barely audible effects, to direct statements. And it offers the same feeling as Murakami’s recent epic, IQ84, albeit in compressed form. Everything operates at a subconscious level. In one passing scene, Tsukuru visits a railway station and hears about the things people leave behind on trains. Dead fœtuses, bloodstained shirts, the ashes of the cremated, photos of vaginas, even “fingers preserved in formaldehyde”: the list might be a sudden lifting of the lid of a spotless and cheerful society to show the horrors just beneath the surface. There’s no doubting that Murakami captures the affectlessness of a society of good-natured blanks to perfection. And although the plot here has remarkable similarities to that of the best-selling Korean novelist, Kyung-Sook Shin, in her recent I’ll be Right There, it succeeds in being both deeply Japanese and entirely international.
At the same time, one may feel that Murakami’s deft pieces of jazz don’t add up to much more than their eerie effects, and the strange, displacing states they pull us into. There’s none of the wistful self-questioning or Marshall McLuhaneseque wit you’ll find in Douglas Coupland’s similar books about “life after God,” none of Bret Easton Ellis’s satiric rage about our worship of brand names. Murakami’s domain—and fascination—is the inexplicable. “Force yourself to try to explain,” Tskuru reflects, near the end, “and you create lies.” Things connect in Murakami’s vision—a woman spins erotic fantasies about another character, even as that character has graphic dreams about her—but not in any way that makes for resolutions, let alone a way out.
The story of colourless Tsukuru sold a million copies in its first week in Japan, and seems certain to captivate readers from Vancouver to Virginia Water; yet even as you’re turning the pages, swiftly, and taking in a story that could not be more user-friendly—it’s lucid as a waking dream—you may feel you’re sinking into the painless after-life that has become Tsukuru’s plight. In Miyazaki’s films, every last desk and passing radish is full of animation; in Murakami, even the human characters have all but given up the ghost.
The whole story of Japan today, I sometimes think, could be told through the two master artists whose initials are HM. Hayao Miyazaki, the exquisite animator behind films like Spirited Away and, most recently, The Wind Rises, is trying, with passionate urgency, to highlight and preserve those spirits that are ever more imperilled in the Japanese countryside; his is a teeming Shinto world in which every last blade of grass is lit up with kamisama, or local deities. Haruki Murakami, by comparison, speaks for a world in which all traditional magic is gone; the characters in his novels can order pizza in Helsinki, sip “Napa Cabernet Sauvignon” at home, buy duty-free Yves Saint-Laurent ties and transport their friends with renditions of Thelonius Monk’s “Round Midnight,” but they can’t for the life of them remember who they are or where they’re going.
Both contemporaries are clearly responding to the question that has long haunted Japan: how to take in the stuff of the west without importing its values and losing one’s soul? But where Miyazaki is trying to shake his country into wakefulness, Murakami dreams up floating, hypnotic tales of sleepwalkers for whom the unreal has more life than reality. Miyazaki’s vision has the feel of the 8th century Japanese capital of Nara, near which I’ve lived for more than 20 years, where deer roam free among 1,300-year-old temples, four-story pagodas and wild plum groves. Murakami serves up the generic, mock-Californian suburb in which my apartment is located, Japanese mostly in its lack of clasically Japanese features.
Both artists, of course, have won huge global followings. These days Miyazaki’s animation studio, Studio Ghibli—whose films include Princess Mononoke and the Oscar-winning Spirited Away—is as strong a brand as Sony or Toyota. And everyone I know, from Istanbul to New Delhi, seems to be devouring Murakami (in part because his books are as easily translated—and consumed—as bottled water). But the two are coming at the issue of how to remain modern and oneself from radically opposite angles. Miyazaki’s every frame is ravishing as a Hiroshige woodcut and, though distributed by Disney, his films are loving evocations of what could only be Japan; Murakami gives voice to the global anomie of men without qualities everywhere, as befits a writer who once taught at Princeton and has translated Raymond Carver and Truman Capote into the language of Tanizaki.
Murakami’s latest novel—like all his novels—flows seamlessly, even as it moves between past and present, the world and the mind. The eponymous Tsukuru is a 36-year-old white-collar worker, living alone in a comfortable one-bedroom condo in central Tokyo, and working as a train station engineer (his one semi-passion). If he has a problem, it’s only that he’s never really known problems; he grew up with everything he could want, the child of “baby-boomer” parents, his father gliding around Nagoya in a chauffeur-driven Mercedes with tinted windows, selling real estate. Unlike those of previous generations, Tsukuru has never had to face hunger or warfare or, you could say, real life. The people around him say things like, “I don’t believe in anything. Not in logic, or illogic. Not in God, or the devil… That’s my basic problem, really. I can’t erect a decent barrier between subject and object.”
Part of Tsukuru’s predicament—not much liking his life, not really disliking it; passing his days under “a thin layer of clouds… though it did not look like rain”—is that he’s always (like every Murakami protagonist) seen himself as “an empty vessel.” Yet as the book goes on, we see that his oldest friends have always thought of him as cool and handsome and full of purpose. This disjunction between how he feels and how he’s regarded echoes the rift between the bland and friction-free surfaces of his life and the violent dreams and troubled memories that rise up from what strikes him as a “deep, inner darkness.” When, at 20, he is abruptly dropped by his four inseparable friends from school (two boys and two girls), Tsukuru feels so abandoned that he loses all will to carry on.
Murakami’s curious talent is for evoking such disconnection and drift—phrases like “airless vacuum” and “vacant attic” constantly recur—in addictively readable scenes; his narratives purr along as smoothly as a high-end Toyota, dashboard beautifully illuminated, speeding through an empty landscape on cruise-control. It’s almost as if his immersion in the surfaces he describes is what allows him to proceed with such ease; he is at one with the weightless dispassion he records. Reading him is strangely akin to walking through contemporary Japan, where every last person is courteous and smiling, but you can feel as if you’re in a world ruled by elevator music.
To a startling extent, Murakami is interested only in the private world, and those moments in which characters lose all hold on reality and tumble down rabbit holes into alternative worlds. He always notes how fit his people are, what kind of Brooks Brothers or Polo shirts they wear, how their “maroon enamel handbags” look; but the real action of the book comes through less visible effects, as Tsukuru feels he’s “swallowed a hard lump of cloud” and, 47 pages on, as if he’s “somehow able to spit out a hard lump of air that had been stuck in his chest.” We hear next to nothing about Tsukuru’s office life, the historical moment, the year in which his story takes place. It’s not hard to guess that the author behind such a character is a friendly recluse who lives alone with his wife, mostly in his imagination, and ventures out only to swim or to take long, punishing runs.
As a boy, we learn, Tsukuru had been defined almost entirely by his circle of friends, his own private model of a perfect, harmonious community; yet after he’s excommunicated by the others—for reasons he only belatedly tries to uncover—he remains stuck for 16 years until a woman, Sara Kimoto, urges him to face up to the ghosts that possess him. (Sara Kimoto is, of course, a perfect Murakami name—at once Japanese and not.) As she tells him that he (and they) can’t move forwards until he confronts his past, she might be addressing Japan itself, famous for airbrushing its history books and refusing to address its wartime demons. Yet Murakami’s gift—an intuitive one—is for suggesting such larger metaphors while still giving his story a personal ache. Tsukuru says, more than once, that he feels as if he’s tumbled off a ship late at night and is flailing around in the dark waters, alone, as the lights of the vessel recede.
It’s perhaps no surprise, then, that the novel flares up into something closest to passion when it comes to dreams and music; indeed, near the end, Tsukuru actually dreams of playing music and suggests that “a crucial aspect of the world [could] only be explained through the medium of music.” The novel takes its title from a suite by the Hungarian composer Franz Liszt called Years of Pilgrimage. The piece evokes, we’re told, “a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape.” (This is Hayao Miyazaki’s theme, too, of course, but here seen in a world of concrete and glass where pastoral scenes are painfully hard to imagine).
Murakami is, in many ways, more a musician than a novelist; he deals in effects, subliminal and non-analytical, more than in action or emotion. His sentences aspire to suggest sensations we can’t define. And where a classical realist like Orhan Pamuk addresses the east-west division in his homeland of Turkey by invoking Fyodor Dostoevsky, Vladimir Nabokov and Marcel Proust, Murakami attempts the same by constantly serving up allusions to music. In this book he refers to, among others, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Elvis Presley’s “Viva Las Vegas!” and the differences between Felix Mendelssohn and Robert Schumann.) Indeed, if some of Murakami’s strongest work, such as the non-fictional Underground, explores why even the best and the brightest in modern Japan join murderous cults just so they’ll have some sense of engagement and direction, other books, like After Dark, proceed almost entirely through atmospherics; that novel is a nocturne, in effect, a piece of global jazz (its title in Japanese is Afuta Daku). Similar, perhaps, to the kind Murakami used to play in the Tokyo jazz bar he ran, Peter Cat.
This is all distinctly Japanese, insofar as it prefers images to ideas, and tremors, barely audible effects, to direct statements. And it offers the same feeling as Murakami’s recent epic, IQ84, albeit in compressed form. Everything operates at a subconscious level. In one passing scene, Tsukuru visits a railway station and hears about the things people leave behind on trains. Dead fœtuses, bloodstained shirts, the ashes of the cremated, photos of vaginas, even “fingers preserved in formaldehyde”: the list might be a sudden lifting of the lid of a spotless and cheerful society to show the horrors just beneath the surface. There’s no doubting that Murakami captures the affectlessness of a society of good-natured blanks to perfection. And although the plot here has remarkable similarities to that of the best-selling Korean novelist, Kyung-Sook Shin, in her recent I’ll be Right There, it succeeds in being both deeply Japanese and entirely international.
At the same time, one may feel that Murakami’s deft pieces of jazz don’t add up to much more than their eerie effects, and the strange, displacing states they pull us into. There’s none of the wistful self-questioning or Marshall McLuhaneseque wit you’ll find in Douglas Coupland’s similar books about “life after God,” none of Bret Easton Ellis’s satiric rage about our worship of brand names. Murakami’s domain—and fascination—is the inexplicable. “Force yourself to try to explain,” Tskuru reflects, near the end, “and you create lies.” Things connect in Murakami’s vision—a woman spins erotic fantasies about another character, even as that character has graphic dreams about her—but not in any way that makes for resolutions, let alone a way out.
The story of colourless Tsukuru sold a million copies in its first week in Japan, and seems certain to captivate readers from Vancouver to Virginia Water; yet even as you’re turning the pages, swiftly, and taking in a story that could not be more user-friendly—it’s lucid as a waking dream—you may feel you’re sinking into the painless after-life that has become Tsukuru’s plight. In Miyazaki’s films, every last desk and passing radish is full of animation; in Murakami, even the human characters have all but given up the ghost.
