Don’t let me borrow your books.

Okay, do let me borrow them, but maybe not ones that have crazy geometric things going on with the front cover.  Otherwise, this might happen:

Sorry, Anastasia.  I did fix it!

“Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” was the first book by Haruki Murakami that I read despite years of walking past them in bookstores and meaning to pick one up.  Anastasia told me it was “fantastic” but that it left her and our other friend who read it “super disoriented.”

I think that’s an entirely accurate description.  It’s not a feel-good book really in any way, but we should read those once in a while.  Life isn’t all puppies and butterflies, after all.

The story basically follows Tsukuru through two periods of his life — late teens/early 20s and his mid 30s.  The events and experiences of the earlier time play heavily on the latter as he tries to deal with how his close group of friends suddenly cut him off for reasons he could not begin to figure out.

Murakami really brings out the book’s central theme during a conversation older Tsukuru has with a woman he is dating named Sara.

“You can hide memories, but you can’t erase the history that produced them,” she says, in a phrase that gets repeated a few times later on.  “If nothing else, you need to remember that.  You can’t erase history, or change it.  It would be like destroying yourself.”

No matter what he does or what face he slaps on to face the world, what happened in the past never changes.  Tsukuru has so much that doesn’t go his way, and yet, he accepts everything as either blameless or his own fault.  He has a way of being sadly optimistic that straddles the line between looking to immediately move on and a thinking akin to “what can I do but accept it?”

A few people have asked me if I would recommend they read this book.  It’s really well written and grabs you in a certain way, but you have to be prepared for the mindset it leaves you throughout.  So maybe?