Things I Read: Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage — Man Got No Colour

Did you know that the ensure Tokyo subway network comprises of 300 stations? In this there are thirteen lines covering a total length of 300km. For comparison, a blue whale - the biggest animal in the world - comes in at just over 25m. It means that the Tokyo subway covers the same length as 12,000 of these ocean traversing mammals!

This factoid is relevant because the protagonist of Haruki Murakami’s thirteenth novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is fascinated by Japanese railway stations. His occupation is to design them; to create seamless internal systems that allow for the free flow of 8.7 million Japanese commuters. Unfortunately it's not a control he maintains in his own life - an incident early in his life causes his childhood friends to inexplicably abandon him and he spends the next twenty years trying, and failing, to come to terms with it.

As a long-time Murakami reader, it's easy to pick on the main themes of the novel - the attempt to overcome historic trauma. It's a concept Murakami explores throughout several of his books. It's expressed less abstractly here than in say, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle. This one is more a direct tale of childhood loss, told with a tinge of classic Murakami melancholy. And yeah there's plenty of awkward sex scenes, don't you worry about that. 

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