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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami Pb. 05/2015 (in paperback), Vintage

The plot of Haruki Murakami's newest novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage flits back and forth in time, but consistently revolves around an event that occurred when the titular protagonist was 20-years-old and in his second year of college: his entire tight-knit group of friends from high school cut off all contact from him without any explanation.

Looking back, Tsukuru Tazaki repeatedly asserts that he doesn't think there could ever be another group of friends like his, that being part of such a group of friends was, “like a lucky but entirely accidental chemical fusion, something that could only happen once.”

When I was a preteen and my teenage sister came back from a night out with friends, or just an eventful day of high school, exchanging her contacts for glasses and taking off her makeup, she would tell me about classmates in intense relationships, absurd parties, and dreamy boys. When I finally graduated from middle school, it seemed as if my high school experience would never be as vibrant as hers.

If I showed the above paragraph to my sister she would be surprised, embarrassed, or in outright denial. She's not overly self-conscious or easily embarrassed, she's just too old to talk about things that way anymore. Her forever is over.

I thought she was right for awhile—that her high school experience was exceptional—because I was a bookish and occasionally bullied underclassman who had long given up trying to understand the aliens around me; they who somehow managed to like the same music, watch the same movies, and dress in the same clothes at the same time.

Through a series of events, some known and some mysterious to me, people started to... like me a few months after I turned 15. It took me just over a year of actually engaging with the high school experience to start talking just like my sister—through the lens of forever. I used words like “best,” “ever,” and “always” more often than I ever before found need to.

The second greatest value of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is in how it depicts the end of forever.

While forever lasts, everything is everything. The defining quality of forever is the anxiety that you will never again feel the way you do in this moment.

After being thrown out of his high school friend group, Tsukuru Tazaki becomes consumed with death. He eats so infrequently that people who knew him before the excommunication, including his mother, can no longer recognize him.

Without his friends, the blinding hues of Tsukuru Tazaki's teenage life turn into dull greys.

The question presents itself: how, and why, do high school experiences matter so much?

At the same time: do they matter at all?

While reading, I counted 18 separate descriptions of silences between people, ranging from “oppressive” and “total” to that with the ability to “[measure] the direction of the wind." Even more frequent were constant, conspicuous, and often seemingly forced analogies to science and the natural world regarding phenomena such as "a young tree absorbing nutrition” from soil or “microorganisms swimming across the circular vision of a microscope.”

The names of Tsukuru Tazaki's high school friends correspond to colors found in nature: “Akamatsu” for red pine, “Oumi” for blue sea, “Shirane” for white root, and “Kurono” for black field. Tsukuru Tazaki's name, which roughly translates as “to build,” does not contain a color, hence his colorlessness.

I excitedly scored the bookmark that came with my copy of this book, separating the motifs into categories and setting up a tally, thinking that it would all make sense in the end, that I had discovered some sort of pattern that was meant to cause an “a-ha!” or “gotcha!” moment at the novel's conclusion.

I was wrong.

Perhaps I would need an English degree to accurately dissect Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, but from what my years of schooling has taught me to discern, these motifs… aren't really motifs. Murakami has random affinities for making analogies to natural phenomena and describing different types of silences. This may be aesthetically notable, but it is thematically insignificant.

Parallel in randomness is the process by which high schoolers turn into people. In the beginning of the novel, Tsukuru describes his friends as classic archetypes. Aka is a brilliant but humble scholar at the top of his class, quiet and unassuming. Kind Ao (derived from Oumi) is a popular jock, with a talent for fostering group spirit. Shiro is a stereotypically feminine pianist “with a model's body” who is fond of the children to whom she teaches piano. Kuro is a sarcastic, opinionated writer never without a book.

When Tsukuru Tazaki finds himself talking about his old group of friends for the first time in sixteen years with his newest girlfriend, Sara, she extends the conversation beyond its natural denouement. She reveals that her insistent inquiries into the nature of Tsukuru's former friend group are for the purpose of being able to find them: she believes that this event in his past is making Tsukuru closed off to her, and wants him to resolve this issue before they continue their relationship. Thus, Tsukuru sets off on a quest to find what has become of his former companions.

Aka, the humble scholar, has become a cult-leader-cum-business-magnate. The generous Ao is aggressively climbing the corporate ladder. Kuro, obviously destined to become a writer, is a housewife who does pottery on the side. Shiro comes the closest to maintaining her high school self in her job as a piano teacher for children. However, her path is also the most unexpected: six years before the start of the book, she is brutally murdered in an unsolved homicide case.

Much of what Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage implicitly teaches is despicable, if not at least questionable. Without justification, female characters introduced to readers simultaneously have their bodies introduced in misogynistic detail. All the women with names are caretakers: Shiro with her students, Kuro with her kids, and Sara, quite irritatingly, with Tsukuru. Without giving away spoilers, I will say that the book's explanation for why Tsukuru was thrown out of his friend group is not only patriarchal, but a disappointing deus ex machina. Unsurprisingly, my memory tells me that the novel fails the Bechdel Test.

When Tsukuru encounters Kuro in Finland, he complains that “all the beautiful possibilities” he and Eri had in high school “have been swallowed up by the flow of time.” Believing his nature to be that of a colorless “empty vessel,” he fears Sara will come to know who he really is and consequently exit his life. However, Tsukuru's assertion in the last pages that “not everything was lost in the flow of time” harkens to the conclusion he came to near the middle of the novel:

‘Maybe I am just an empty, futile person,’ he thought. ‘But it was precisely because there was nothing inside of me that these people could find, if even for a short time, a place where they belonged. Like a nocturnal bird seeks a safe place to rest during the day in a vacant attic. The birds like that empty, dim, silent place.’

That's what Tsukuru and Eri are: harbors. As a vessel to be used for the benefit of other people, Eri is obviously seen playing that role for her husband and daughters. Tsukuru, however? Exactly whom he is harboring or will harbor is not indicated but strongly suggested by the book's last line referring to “birds calling out in the night.”

It's easy to assume that the people I go to high school with will follow the logical trajectories I have laid out for them according to their archetypes. The untalented jocks will work in cubicles, the talented jocks will drop out of college, the artsy kids will become clerks at convenience stores, the valedictorians will pursue comfortable jobs in academia, and at least one of the theater kids will become an actor.

Wrong again.

Although Murakami's novel supports the assumption that who someone is in high school will irreversibly form who they are as an adult, it also refutes it. The most valuable implication of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is the obligation to respect all the multitudes contained within a person.

Raiders sign cornerback Chimdi Chekwa

Raiders sign cornerback Chimdi Chekwa

Raiders sign cornerback Chimdi Chekwa after brief stint with Patriots

           USATODAY – NFL Top Stories

Raiders sign cornerback Chimdi Chekwa (Yahoo Sports)

Raiders sign cornerback Chimdi Chekwa (Yahoo Sports)

ALAMEDA, Calif. (AP) — The Oakland Raiders have signed cornerback Chimdi Chekwa. Yahoo Sports – NFL News

Raiders sign cornerback Chimdi Chekwa (Yahoo Sports)

Raiders sign cornerback Chimdi Chekwa (Yahoo Sports)

ALAMEDA, Calif. (AP) — The Oakland Raiders have signed cornerback Chimdi Chekwa. Yahoo Sports – NFL News

A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki Pb. 12/2013 (in paperback), Penguin Press

Quoting Proust, the epigraph for Part II of Ruth Ozeki’s latest novel A Tale For The Time Being reads: “In reality, every reader, while he is reading, is the reader of his own self… The reader's recognition in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its truth.”

And so it is with myself.

A Tale For The Time Being is an epistolary novel of sorts. The book connects Japanese-born, California-raised teenager Nao (a girl) with Ruth, a former writer and resident of a small British Columbian island, through a diary the latter spots while walking down a beach after the 2011 tsunami.

Ruth Ozeki's rendering of her teenage protagonist convinces: Nao's hopes, worries, and fantasies resemble those one might encounter on the Tumblr of a teen who publishes neurotic text posts documenting negative social interactions from their day or reblogs lowercase poems that start with “its two a.m. and i'm thinking of you.”

Although I would not classify myself as belonging to that arbitrarily specific subset of teenagers, I would be as prone as they to reblogging The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows’s post defining sonder as, “the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own.”

Ozeki's novel actually begins with what could be considered a literary sonder. Within the first chapter, Nao contemplates the type of person who will find the diary that she has wrapped in a plastic bag and sent out to sea. Will this hypothetical reader of her diary “have a cat [whose] forehead [smells] like cedar trees and fresh sweet air?” Or will they be “eating cold Chinese noodles from a box?”

The person who finds Nao's diary is not the type of person to eat cold Chinese noodles from a box but rather a middle-aged woman, Ruth, who lives a cushy, heavily patterned life with her husband Oliver, not-writing a memoir she’s been unable to finish for ten years.

For the vast majority of A Tale For the Time Being, Ruth is a vehicle through which Ozeki can provide expository information about Japanese culture and British Columbian geography, and to relay to the reader whether the events described in Nao's diary could have really happened. Of course, sometimes Ruth is given backstory, but it's not very interesting.

In a delightful exception to the rule, sensible Ruth is utilized as a foil to Nao's imaginative temperament. Giving voice to the teenage tendency of “living so intensely in your head [that] there isn’t any difference between what you imagine and what actually takes place,” Nao decides at one point in the novel that she will become a ghost through sheer willpower—this despite her inconvenient “alive” status. True to the novel's pattern of alternating between Ruth and Nao, the next chapter shows Ruth encountering the harsh nature of reality. Ruth spends hours Googling the supposed-revolutionary nun Nao has dedicated to write about, trying to determine whether she really exists.

Nao resembles other self-infatuated teenagerly protagonists in her fantasies about her own funeral and her overall obsession with death, but my favorite parts of the novel occur when Ozeki speaks to the teenage experience in a way contrary to that of pop culture; that is, deterministically. Although I don't necessarily believe that all events and actions are predetermined by forces outside of human control, I think it's important for teenagers to acquire the inner peace that can come from accepting such an idea.

As someone inundated with Instagram posts that read “every day is a new chance to change the world” attached to under-exposed shots of sunsets, I found the character of Jiko Yasutani, Nao's aunt, refreshing. A “New Woman” whose writings were prominent in the Taisho era, Jiko is a Zen Buddhist nun who differs from Nao in that she confronts reality as it is, but differs from Ruth in that she is satisfied anyways.

I think those Instagram posts are not only annoying, but unrealistic, because there are so many things that are out of our control; there is so much we do not know when we set out to change the world in some particular area or field. In actuality, setting out to change any sort of tradition or technology is only appealing when terribly naive. To claim that one can just change the world through optimism and sheer willpower is foolish, like going to the beach and trying to hold back the waves.

When Jiko and Nao go to the beach, Jiko commands Nao to “bully” a wave. In doing this, Jiko supplies Nao with a walking stick so that she can find the biggest wave possible and “give it a punch.” This experiment is just an opportunity for Jiko to relay a moral: the uselessness of fighting the inevitable.

I would like to say that Ruth Ozeki wrote determinism into this book, and not that I read it into being, but, to quote Ozeki herself, “in this tangled world of cause and effect, it is impossible to know.”

Nigerian born CHIMDI (Honourable) is a music minister and a gospel artiste with the mandate to raise world leaders through effective praise and worship. You can follow him on twitter and instagram @Chimdi07. like his facebook page; Hon. Chimdi.

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