The Colors of Life

Earlier in the year, I attempted a few pages of Haruki Murakami's 'Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki - And His Years of Pilgrimage' in Japanese and gave up after a while. It was slow going; I had a problem with concepts and certain notions that my language abilities aren't strong enough to grasp. If I wanted to practise the language, I should have picked a simpler book. Grrrrr. Brilliantly translated by Philip Gabriel, this English version was indeed a faster read. (Reviews here, here, here and here.)

Protagonist is Tsukuru Tazaki and the story revolves around his relationship with his four friends in high school. The men are Aka (red) and Ao (blue), the women are Shiro (white) and Kuro (black). The protagonist is supposed to be 'colorless Tsukuru' after all. They didn't remain friends after high school. Decades separated them and Tsukuru never knew why he was rejected from the group. His new girlfriend Sara realized that he was still living in the past, and his current self was an empty shell. She called time on their relationship, found his high school friends and made him re-visit the people, the cities of Nagoya, Tokyo and to Finland; unearthing buried secrets and clarifying misguided realities.

Don't want to talk much about this book. Spoilers lah. Go read it. I'm not the biggest Murakami fan. I think this constitutes as a 'trendy' read for me simply because the friends read it and I want to know what they're gushing over. Heh. Well, I'm neutral about this book. Not particularly fond of it, but don't hate it either. It's less surreal than his other works. Much easier to relate to. Again, it's not a genre I'm fond of. So there. All I know is, I can't get Franz Liszt's 'Années de pèlerinage' out of my head. Three movements, six minutes each. A good workout. Well it's piece I don't mind hammering out on the piano because it's got manageable sharps and flats. Hurhurhur.

Our lives are like a complex musical score, Tsukuru thought. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people could correctly understand, or appreciate the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted? 

Make sure you hang on to Sara, Eri had told him. You really need her. You don't lack anything. Be confident and bold. That's all you need. 

And don't let the bad elves get you.