Her long, straight black hair, her shapely fingers on the keyboard, her smooth, white, graceful (yet strangely eloquent) calves, her playing of Franz Liszt’s ‘Le mal du pays.’” Her thoughts, her opinions, her feelings, her hopes and dreams - all of them had vanished without a trace. “She was no more than a handful of white ash. “One of them no longer existed here,” Tsukuru recalls of one of his friends, who died in adulthood. 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. … When I think of these things … I wake my wife up and I hold on to her and cry.” In some sense, such a setup recalls Murakami’s 1987 novel “Norwegian Wood,” which also involves someone in his 30s reassessing his experience as a student, or his early story “The Silence,” in which a man who received the silent treatment in high school reflects that “it’s impossible, in my own mind, to believe in people. And this contradiction continued to perplex and confuse him, from his boyhood all the way to the present, when he was thirty-six years old.”

“Though he lacked a striking personality,” the author continues, “or any qualities that made him stand out, and despite always aiming for what was average, the middle of the road, there was (or seemed to be) something about him that wasn’t exactly normal, something that set him apart. “It was as if,” Murakami writes, “he were sleepwalking through life, as if he had already died but not yet noticed it.” It’s a condition that lingers into adulthood. The betrayal sends Tsukuru into a spiral. This unit of five was once inseparable “We had several unspoken rules,” he explains, “one of them being As much as we possibly can, we do things together, all five of us.” Haruki Murakami’s “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” begins with a simple premise: A Tokyo railroad engineer, the Tsukuru Tazaki of the novel’s title, unable to get over the summer of his sophomore year in college, when for no reason he can determine he was cut off by his close-knit group of high school friends.

The strange library haruki