Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Haruki Murakami) This is one of my favorite authors, and I definitely enjoyed this book. It does have a story line, but it takes a while to become obvious. Tsukuru is "colorless" in that no part of his name is a color, whereas the other four friends in his high school group all did. This group was so harmonious and tight, doing charity works together, a really special bond. Tsukuru was the only one to move away from Nagoya to go to school, engineering school in Tokyo, where he followed his dream of becoming a creator of railway stations. But in his second year of university, only 20 years old, suddenly he is cut off by his former friends, with no explanation. For a good year, he wanted to die, literally, although not suicide, just fade away, but he continues with his life and is 36 when we actually hear the rest of his tale. As usual with Murakami, there are long dreamlike passages and incidents that hover in your mind as reality but maybe not.... but meeting a young woman named Sara puts him on a path to finally confront these friends to find out why he was so brutally cut off from them. Part of this involves a trip to Finland, which I found probably as exotic as he did. Tsukuru has always thought of himself as colorless, lackluster, no particular personality, and so forth, as though any human could be that way, truly, so he is on a personal pilgrimage of sorts in the book, even if he didn't really travel other than that trip to Helsinki. "Pilgrimage" is also a reference to a particular piece of music by Liszt that plays an important role in the novel, specifically a piece called "Mal du Pays". The reviews on this book are all over the place, but I really liked this book a lot.

on the bench near the entrances

A friend gave me the book to read on vacation. I did not get to it but thought I would leave it for someone to enjoy!