"Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" is the long-awaited new novel - a book that sold more than a million copies the first week it went on sale in Japan - from the award-winning, internationally best-selling author Haruki Murakami.
Here he gives us the remarkable story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss; of dreams and nightmares that have unintended consequences for the world around us; and of a journey into the past that is necessary to mend the present. It is a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages.
“Mesmerizing, immersive, hallucinogenic. . . . [Colorless Tsukuru] calls to mind Murakami’s career-defining 1987 novel, Norwegian Wood.” —Entertainment Weekly
“Hypnotic. . . . Colorless Tsukuru spins a weave of . . . vivid images around a great mystery. . . . In the past decade, James Wood has convincingly argued that what the novel does best is show us what consciousness feels like. Murakami, in his own oblique way, has sharpened that objective to a mystical cognitive science: This, so many of what of his books tell us, is what perception feels like. . . . [He] elegantly describes how emotional trauma can lead us to disassociate. . . . The story flows along smoothly, wrapping around details like objects in a stream.” —John Freeman, The Boston Globe
“[Murakamai] has opened his vision, his sensibility, to reflect the distances implicit in being alive. . . . More than just a story but rather a meditation on everything the narrative provokes. How do we connect, or reconnect, to those around us but also to the very essence of ourselves? Where, in the flatness of contemporary society—which in this novel, as in so much of his work, Murakami evokes with a masterful understatement—do we find some point of intersection, some lasting depth? . . . There is a rawness, a vulnerability, to these characters, a sense that the surface of the world is thin, and the border between inner and outer life, between existence as we know it and something far more elusive, is easily effaced.” —David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times
Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 but spent most of his youth in Kobe. His father was a son of a Buddhist priest. His mother was a daughter of a merchant from Osaka. They both taught Japanese literature.
Since his early years as a child Murakami has been heavily influenced by Western culture, particularly in terms of Western music and literature. He grew up reading everything from the works of American writers such as Vonnegut and Brautigan, to Dostoyevsky and Balzac, and he is often distinguished from other Japanese writers for his western influences. Japanese literature often emphasises on beautiful language, which can result in stiff, restricted composition, while Murakami's style is relatively free and fluid.
Murakami studied drama at Waseda University in Tokyo where he met his wife, Yoko. His first job was in a record store (which is where one of his main characters, Toru Watanabe from "Norwegian Wood:, works). After finishing his studies, Murakami opened the jazz bar "Peter Cat" in Tokyo, which he ran from 1974-1982. Many of his novels have musical themes and titles referring to a particular song, including "Dance, Dance, Dance" (from The Dells), "Norwegian Wood" (after the Beatles song) and "South of the Border, West of the Sun" (the first part being the title of a song by Nat King Cole).
According to "The Guardian", Haruki Murakami is “among the world’s greatest living novelists”. By now, the Japanese author has been awarded with the Franz Kafka prize of the Czech Republic and the Jerusalem Prize, given for distinguished impact on the world’s idea of freedom. His novel ‘Norwegian Wood” (1987) was a mass cult in his native Japan, selling millions of copies and becoming a contemporary myth. “The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle” (1994/1995) is much more socially-conscious in comparison with his previous works, interested majorly in personal and quite impressionist depictions of solitude and alienation. “Kafka on the Shore” (2002) turned out to be his most critically acclaimed work, legitimately making him one of the indisputable masters of postmodern literature worldwide.
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