Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Symbols & Motifs

Le Mal du Pays

The work of classical composer Franz Liszt helps establish the novel’s tone. References to Liszt’s Le Mal du Pays specifically tie together Tsukuru’s memories of Shiro and Haida. The narrator calls Liszt’s Years of Pilgrimage—the set of 26 piano compositions which includes Le Mal du Pays—“the vein that connected these three scattered people. […] The power of music made it possible. Whenever he listened to that music, particularly Le Mal du Pays, vivid memories of the two of them swept over him” (197).

Haida loves this piano piece. He points out that in French, Le Mal du Pays is usually “translated as ‘homesickness,’ or ‘melancholy.’ If you put a finer point on it, it’s more like ‘a groundless sadness called forth in a person’s heart by a pastoral landscape” (51). Tsukuru’s most vivid and persistent memory of his friend Shiro is of her playing this Liszt piece. The melancholy implicit in the composition’s name seems all the more fitting when he learns of her sad demise.

Tsukuru repeatedly listens to Le Mal du Pays in moments of internal turmoil; when he does, his mood shifts toward sorrow: “the quiet, melancholy music gradually gave shape to the undefined sadness enveloping his heart, as if countless microscopic bits of pollen adhered to an invisible being concealed in the air, ultimately revealing, slowly and silently, its shape” (197). The music helps Tsukuru find a relevant expression for his natural temperament—sorrow.

Swimming

Swimming gives Tsukuru relief from anxiety and dread throughout his life: “Being in the water calmed him more than any other place. Swimming a half hour twice a week allowed him to maintain a calm balance between mind and body. He also found the water a great place to think. A kind of Zen meditation” (186).

This merging of thought and muscle becomes key to Tsukuru recovering from his depression and ongoing thoughts of death at the start of the novel. After a dream that demands that Tsukuru pick a desirable woman’s body or heart, but not both, the exercise of swimming helps him reconnect these features of being human. The repetition of swimming strokes eases Tsukuru’s troubled emotional state and provides clarity to his anxious thinking: “The longer he swam, the more automatic this cycle became. The number of strokes he needed for each lap was the same each time. He gave himself up to the rhythm, counting only the number of turns” (188). Tsukuru’s everyday life is defined by a tension between accepting unpredictability and fighting against it. When he is swimming, he can move along mechanically, lessening the resistance of the water through which he swims. Also significant is the pattern of rhythmic, deliberate breathing established by swimming—focusing on proper breathing rather than on imagined catastrophes helps Tsukuru rein in his anxiety.

Train Stations

Tsukuru sees train stations as the ultimate manifestation of humanity’s attempt to create order out of chaos. He finds in them a calming external influence: “He couldn’t strike a balance between himself and the world around him. But there was still a place for him to return. He knew this. Get on a bullet train at the Tokyo station and in an hour and a half he’d arrive at an orderly, harmonious, intimate place” (21). The train station offers Tsukuru evidence that meaning can be found even when confusion and aimlessness are the only mental states he can access.

Train stations are portals of transience. People pass through them on their way to somewhere else. Tsukuru has the opposite reaction to train stations—they interest him so much that he has built his career out of never leaving these transitional places: “He wasn’t sure why, but for as long as he could remember, he had loved to observe train stations” (11). Naturally, Tsukuru became an engineer tasked with finding ways to make existing stations ever more efficient. His aptitude for and enjoyment of this work shows that Tsukuru is drawn to the idea of restructuring the world to make it simpler and smoother to traverse. In the rest of his life, however, he struggles to do this. Instead, his experiences are like the stations for most people: He passes through them without registering how best to navigate them. Tsukuru is a character without permanence and the fact that he has such passion for train stations is symbolic of this pattern in his life.