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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

By: Philip Gabriel - translator, Haruki Murakami
Narrated by: Bruce Locke
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin. 

A mesmerising mystery story about friendship from the internationally best-selling author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84.

Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning 'red pine', and Oumi, 'blue sea', while the girls' names were Shirane, 'white root', and Kurono, 'black field'. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it.

One day Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.

Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

©2013 Haruki Murakami (P)2021 Penguin Audio Coming of Age Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic reviews

Long-listed, I.M.P.A.C. Dublin Award, 2016

Long-listed, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, 2015
All stars
Most relevant
great story. but a strange decision by the narrator to read the dialogue out in a Japanese English accent

excellent story, strange narration

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Tsukuru finds himself abruptly cut off by his adolescent friends with damaging repercussions that lead him to live a relatively solitary life. He has difficulty with relationships and trust. This is the story of how, 16 years later, he seeks the reason for is abandonment, finds a kind of reconciliation and attempts to move on.

In this book Murakami avoids magical realism, well, almost. The little false trails that seem like they belong to other stories - Haida's father encounter with Midorikawa and the Stationmaster's tale of the severed sixth fingers, Tsukuru's speculations about Shiro's murder, all hint at an alternative reality just out of reach.

The Magic of Murakami

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The narrator kept putting on weird accents for direct speech. They were quite different from the (unaccented) way he narrated the rest of the story, which was very jarring.

Weird performance

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I liked it. A bit different from his other novels - not fantastical but still a beautiful story of longing and loneliness.

Good narration. Liked the story

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I wouldn’t recommend this book to anyone. Pointless story, doesn’t get anywhere. Went into waffle overload in the last chapter. Silly story.

Pointless meandering waffle

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