Murakami in chiaroscuro

The Japanese writer's 13th novel is not intended to be read so much as to be performed in the theatre of the reader's mind

COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE
Author: Haruki Murakami
Publisher: Harvill Secker
Pages: 298
Price: £20

This novel, Haruki Murakami’s 13th, comes with a set of stickers, a soundtrack suggestion (Lazar Berman, playing Liszt’s Mal du Pays; listen to this on vinyl for maximum fanboy points) and instructions on how to read a Murakami novel: “The piece seems simple technically, but it’s hard to get the expression right. Play it just as it’s written on the score, and it winds up pretty boring. But go the opposite route and interpret it too intensely, and it sounds cheap. Just the way you use the pedal makes all the difference, and can change the entire character of the piece.”

The pleasures and pitfalls of reading Murakami were summarised a while back in a viral Murakami Bingo game. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage has a high bingo score: mysterious woman, old jazz/ classical record, urban ennui, something vanishing, weird sex, unusual name, train station, parallel worlds, et cetera.

Each Murakami novel of the last decade has displayed his trademarks: the deceptively easy, fluid technique and well-honed craft, the ability to create another familiar Murakami world but also to retain a touch of strange about the edges, the sense of inhabiting someone else’s unsettling dreams. As with all truly great writers and artists, he walks the knife-edge of his own virtuosity: the more perfect the novel, the greater the danger that the classic Murakami novel also doubles as the classic Murakami parody.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is both, and that is interesting. If the novel that preceded this, IQ84, was a multiplayer game, the role for the reader is subtly different here. You, the reader, are Liszt’s pianist; it is up to you whether you can find the depth hidden behind the embellishments, or whether this remains superficial, boring or cheap. Murakami’s 13th novel is not intended to be read so much as to be performed in the private theatre of the reader’s mind.

Tsukuru Tazaki was once one of a group of five friends; as an adult, he is beginning to admit that his apparently successful life as a designer of train stations is bleak and eviscerated of meaning.

“The reason why death had such a hold on Tsukuru Tazaki was clear. One day his four closest friends 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.”

It is only when his girlfriend, Sara, who plays an oddly wooden, maternal-therapist role, suggests that enough time has gone by — more than 16 years — that Tsukuru realises he can go back and find out from his friends what happened.

If childhood rejection seems a slender peg to hang grief on, in a time when the world is preoccupied with the threats of ISIS, Ebola, drones, the bombings of civilian populations, earthquakes and every other item you might imagine on the list of things to fear, it is one of Murakami’s gifts as a novelist to make this work.

For one, Tsukuru is not colourless at all. He was the only one of the five friends, two other boys and two girls, Kuro and Shiro, whose name had no colour attached to it. But as he realises how hollowed out he has been — “I’ve been clinging to this world like the discarded shell of an insect stuck to a branch” — the vast hole that abandonment has left in his life fills up with the roar of many disparate things.

First, there is a healing dream of the black but vital force of jealousy, then he hears a fable about dying well, and then he has an erotic dream that transgresses several taboos — is it creepy to have sexual fantasies about someone who is dead, even if you do not know at the time that they died a long time ago? And what if the fantasies spur a real-life encounter that breaks even more taboos?

The greatness of Murakami is that he leaves these issues open. What matters to him is a far more unsettling question: where are the boundaries between what is imaginary and what is real? So many of the characters in this novel have porous boundaries between dream and imagination in their own minds, and that porosity causes very real damage.

To follow Colorless Tsukuru on his pilgrimage, the reader must suspend disbelief in one crucial way: the alacrity with which his former friends agree to meet him, and unravel the mystery of his outcast years, does not ring true, but if you can get past that hiccup, the encounters are in themselves fascinating. As he meets his old friends, one of them mildly repellent, one warm and perhaps the most real person in the book, solving the mystery of what happened becomes less important than making sense of how we end up with the lives we inhabit.

The world Murakami creates, in Tokyo and in Helsinki, is as vivid as a Bergman film, and filled with his particular touches of light and darkness. Sometimes the wisdom imparted by his characters is sonorous — fortune cookies written by a superior version of Paulo Coelho: “That amazing time in our lives is gone, and will never return. All the beautiful possibilities we had then have been swallowed up in the flow of time.”

But what is wise, or clever, and what is true is not necessarily the same thing; Murakami often sacrifices the former for the latter in this novel.

This is not the best of Murakami’s works, but reading it is almost exactly like listening to that Liszt recording: in an unquiet and relentlessly noisy world, here is something that will make you pause, and settle into a quieter, more intensely reflective space for a while. It is as pointless to judge Colorless Tsukuru’s pilgrimage as it is to judge an old-school jazz recording: just put Murakami on the old record player and listen as he blows a few lazy, wistful, wild notes.