I was relieved to see in the press other commentators admitting that nobody really knows what is going on in a Murakami novel. They are the sort of thing one knows is good without being able to say why. And it is a lot of people now, across the world, that queue to buy each new title so that it only needs to say Murakami on the cover and nobody thinks it is Ryu.
The novels fit into two distinct categories, the more talked about perhaps being those with parallel worlds, that cross boundaries of reality and make Murakami really a magic realist, such as the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or A Wild Sheep Chase but the likes of South of the Border, West of the Sun don't stretch the limits of our perception in anywhere near the same way. I wonder if in his most recent books, Murakami isn't bringing the two approaches closer together. In 1Q84, it was a vast epic but we felt a little surer of ourselves and this time although it is quite possible that we might be led off into some other reality, it is only really the possibility that dreams might overlap with life. But this is not a particularly strange book at all.
Tsukuru Tazaki is a member of a close-knit group of friends as a young man with two girls and two other boys but he suddenly finds himself cast out from the group for no explicablre reason and none he can find out. So far, we might be back in Donna Tartt's The Secret History because one of them is later murdered. Tsukuru is the only one of them whose name doesn't have a colour in it but he is not really 'colourless', it is only a joke, but he is damaged by the rejection and takes his colourless character to heart. The pilgrimage of the title is the story of how, after 16 years, he sets about finding out what happened.
Murakami has moments of brilliant psychological insight into self-doubt, the 'bliss' of close friendship and the hollowness of its loss. Tsukuru has become a designer of railway stations as per a teenage interest, but he doesn't travel far. As he tracks down his old friends he finds how successful they have become in their various lives but Murakami uses the opportunity to paint a picture of corporate soullessness, of business and the grim lives of the commuter (in a beautiful last chapter where Tsukuru contemplates the main Shinguku station) and he leaves us with him surely on the brink of redemption, not necessarily as colourless as he thought.
As in the novels of Banana Yoshimoto, the human condition is expressed somewhere between the transcendence of absorption and merging with others and the bleakness of isolation and if this sounds like this generation's remake of the cult of Catcher in the Rye, then maybe it is. Forced to confront his own perceived neutral nature, Tsukuru reflects,
Maybe I am just an empty, futile person, he thought. But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic.
Liszt's piano piece Le mal du pays is a motif throughout the book, a piece that Shiro, the (inevitably beautiful) tragic girl of the group, had played. It suggests a sort of homesickness, redolent of displacement or not even having a home to go back to. Listening to it as the story of his estrangement becomes clear, Tsukuru understands that,
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.
The reason why Tsukuru was cast out of the group so abruptly was perhaps in a way an unlikely tribute to him, callous though it certainly was in all its collateral damage. Murakami handles it superbly and we are in doubt throughout and still not even completely sure at the end. One can't be sure of the original text when reading a translation and this has been translated into American rather than English but one can see enough to estimate that this is a beautiful book in Japanese. Murakami, as translator of Raymond Carver and Chandler into English, is a stylist of a pared-down prose that is as careful and accurate as his observation of human behaviour. While resolving the pain into an ordinariness that befits Tsukuru's stoicism, having come through a period of death obsession and workmanlike routine, Murakami doesn't offer an ending back in the home key but leaves the piece on a chord that only anticipates resolution. No, it had never occured to him to travel to Matsumoto station and he never has to check his diary when his girlfriend suggests a date but where his contemporaries have found themselves superficially successful, Tsukuru's story has been more worthy of the telling.
I think at the time I said I suspected 1Q84, which was more or less a thriller, might have been Murakami's best book yet but I think this is better. He is not resting on previous achievements and delivering more of the same (which might be suspected of Banana), but he is refining and consolidating the elements of his art and I am genuinely a part of his worldwide cult of admirers. This book arrived on Friday, I began it early Saturday afternoon and finished it, on page 298, on Sunday night. They are not 298 densely printed pages but notwithstanding that, there was nothing else I wanted to do.
It is a few years now since I first heard him suggested as a candidate for the Nobel Prize. It might not be far away now.