Book Notes, Summary and Review: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

I finished Haruki Murakami's Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki in less than a day.

The protagonist, Tsukuru Tazaki, deals with the sudden departure of his only four friends. His friends have unanimously decided to cut Tsukuru out from their lives, without ever explaining why. He carries this heavy sense of despair with him for nearly sixteen years. This is until he meets Sara who ultimately convinces him to find out what happened all those years ago.

Suffering

For nearly half a year, Tsukuru's sudden exile sends him into a wretched depressive episode with suicidal ideation. That was his lowest point in life.

All he would think about was dying. It was as though he had "already died but not yet noticed it". He thought: if he focused intensely on what is going on inside of him, his heart would stop. Contrary to his expectation, his heart doesn't stop; as he discovers, the heart "apparently doesn't stop that easily".

Gradually, Tsukuru climbs out of his depression. While he may have survived this bitter ordeal, he knows he no longer is the same person. Now he's only existing, not living. This senseless suffering that he was subjected to has broken his spirit, hardened the walls of his heart and abolished his faith in common goodness.

Irrational suffering may eventually worm its way into your life, like how it found its way into Tsukuru's life. Nevertheless cynicism should never be your response to mindless suffering, because it doesn't help you in any way. It only poisons your mind and deadens your soul.

You ought to face this suffering, endure it and make sense out of it.

Friendship

What made his friends' abandonment particularly painful was the sense of community he derived from them. As Tsukuru describes, he got the "sustenance" he needed as an adolescent from his friends, akin to "a young tree absorbing nutrition from the soil".

Later, however, Tsukuru realizes that true friendship isn't only crafted through harmony alone; it can also be forged through pain and hardship.

One heart is not connected to another through harmony alone. They are, instead, linked deeply through their wounds. Pain linked to pain, fragility to fragility.

No friendship is ever a waste. Even if our friendships lasted only for a few short years or ended abruptly and painfully, they had bestowed us with unique and memorable experiences that were crucial in shaping who we become. Erasing our shared memories or the history that produced them, if that's even possible, is akin to destroying yourself.

You are the culmination of your memories and experiences.

Concluding message

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is ultimately a book on growing up — our choppy transition from adolescence to adulthood.

Part of growing up is about translating the unknown into the known, the unconscious into the conscious, and the unforgivable into the forgivable. All of us have wounds to heal, yet they shouldn't deter us from loving the world and our life with all our hearts.

We truly believed in something back then, and we knew we were the kind of people capable of believing in something — with all our hearts. And that kind of hope will never simply vanish.

This is a must-read book for all young adults. Hopefully, you'll find the book as meaningful as it was to me. Give it a read, and tell me what you think about it.