Observations on Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Tsukuru is man haunted by a prematurely severed friendship that lingers like a phantom limb. He lives in an incomplete world, a world of suspended adolescence. Murakami doesn’t create this world; rather he establishes the narrator’s point of view and the world flows out from that singular coordinate. Tsukuru’s thoughts shape the feel his environment in one direction or another. The temporal flexibility of his memory gives the reader the same vague feeling about time and place as Tsukuru. Murakami’s stories are very much about picking out the details in overlapping layers of grey. The mundane urban landscape is ambiguously intertwined with the cosmological universe and the protagonist’s own psychological universe. His dreams are often more vividly portrayed then reality. Murakami achieves effect this by providing intense physical description to accompany Tazaki’s imaginations, however when he wakes those descriptions become vaguer and the reader is returned to the sluggish, reflective pace of Tazaki’s daily grind.

These interlocking realities are presented to the reader sensorially. Murakami revels in the bleak silence of isolation just as much as the oblique, often stilted banter between characters.  On every page we are overwhelmed with the sights, sounds and tastes of Tazaki’s insular world. What Tsukuru eats, or often doesn’t, is informed by his ever-changing relationships. Plain bread and vegetables, Haida’s fragrant omelets and the meals he shares with Sahara are each indelible landmarks in Tsukuru’s life. Murakami’s reference to Franz Liszt’s Le mal du, from his Years of Pilgrimage Suite, and Thelonious Monk’s Round Midnight serve as similar reference points for Tsukuru. The meaning and importance of these songs evolves contextually throughout the narrative. This fluid soundtrack creates an atmospheric ground for Murakami’s world to rest on. Dragged reluctantly from his solipsism by acquaintances old and new, Tsukuru is forced to confront his past and by extension he begins to convey a wider world.