Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

// Synopsis //

In this Bildungsroman of the realist kind (hints of the author's magical realism are left to dreams and tales), the third-person narrative follows the past and present of Tsukuru Tazaki (pronounced [tsu?.ku?.?u? ta.za.ki], roughly "tsoo-koo-roo tah-zah-kee"), a man who wants to understand why his life was derailed sixteen years ago.

In the early 1990s in his home town of Nagoya, the young Tsukuru was a fan of train stations. In high school, the two boys and two girls that were his four best friends all had a color as part of their surnames, leaving him the "colorless" one of their "orderly, harmonious community". But one day in 1995, during his second year in college, his friends abruptly cut all relationships with him. That never-explained, Kafkaesque ostracism left him feeling suicidal then guilty "as an empty person, lacking in color and identity"; and when his only college friend vanished the next semester, he felt "fated to always be alone".

Now in 2011's Tokyo, the 36-year-old engineer Tazaki works for a railroad company and builds stations. His new girlfriend Sara spurs him "to come face-to-face with the past, not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up" and seek his former friends to mend the relationships and find out why they rejected him, because she won't commit to him unless he can move past that issue. And so he will visit them one by one, first back in Nagoya, then in rural Finland, on a quest for truth and a pilgrimage for happiness.