Murakami's Book Of Sand

This review appeared in the latest issue of India Today.

Haruki Murakami’s new novel is quite unlike the baggy mess that was his earlier 1Q84. Here, there are no Little People, towns of cats and skies with two moons. It does bear the usual Murakami trademarks – alienated characters roaming Tokyo, references to jazz and classical music, the leaking of the past into the present and a collapsed distance between fantasy and reality – but it is closer to his “quieter” works such as Norwegian Wood and Sputnik Sweetheart. Yet, there’s an odd insubstantiality to the novel which makes it less than satisfying, an unintentional colourlessness that seems to have leaked into the text from the character of the protagonist.

The eponymous Tsukuru Tazaki, when the novel opens, has fallen “like Jonah in the belly of the whale…into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost in a dark, stagnant void.” This suicidal mood arises because he has suddenly and inexplicably been excluded from a charmed circle of four high school friends, all of whom have names related to colours: Miss White, Miss Black, Mr Red and Mr Blue. Tsukuru alone is a colourless and lacklustre Mr Average, but there’s also “something about him that wasn’t exactly normal, something that set him apart”.

Tsukuru changes a great deal after his friends summarily announce that “they did not want to see him, or talk to him, ever again”, thus banishing him from a fraternal Eden that once was an “orderly and harmonious community”. Now in his mid-thirties, a solitary creature of habit, almost an automaton, he lives in Tokyo working for a company that constructs railway stations (Tsukuru, you see, means “to make” or “to build”). Into his life comes a girlfriend who, wanting a more meaningful relationship, urges him to finally investigate the cause of his rejection, something he has turned his back on all these years. “You need to come face to face with the past,” she tells him, “not as some naive, easily wounded boy, but as a grown-up, independent professional.” And so the man who builds stations that enable people to converge and connect embarks on a journey to meet his former friends and find the reason behind his own uncoupling.

There is much exposition, especially in the early sections, to do with the characters of the friends, their togetherness and their meetings, and this has the effect of robbing the narrative of a certain granularity. Then again, this being Murakami, the narrative is intertwined with tales and occurrences that can best be described as otherworldly, especially when it comes to another solitary character whom Tsukuru befriends in Tokyo. Death tokens, auras, six-fingered individuals and intense sexual dreams put in appearances, among other things, and characters openly engage in ruminations on philosophy, free will, the nature of evil, the unfolding of talent and the qualities of solitude. We’re thus encouraged to look upon reality as we know it in a new light. In the words of one of the characters: “One thing I can say, though, is that once you see that true sight with your own eyes, the world you've lived in till now will look flat and insipid. There's no logic or illogic in that scene. No good or evil. Everything is merged into one.”

Tsukuru comes across his friends again without too much trouble; they’re in infrequent contact with one another now, and his pilgrim’s progress even takes him to Finland to meet one of them who has settled there. The reason that they turned against him all those years ago comes as a surprise to him, containing as it does shades of the Marabar Caves episode in Forster’s A Passage to India. This provides Murakami with more opportunities to cogitate on the space between emotional and rational reality, with Tsukuru wondering whether he has just one self belonging to just one world, and whether the actions of one impinge upon the other. In his valiant attempt to bridge these divergences, he learns, among other lessons, that “there is no silence without a cry of grief, no forgiveness without bloodshed, no acceptance without a passage through acute loss.” Deep.

At times, Murakami delineates with grace and tenderness moments of connection between individuals, as well as the opposite, agonising periods of sorrow and solitude. As with his earlier work, the effect of music on characters is movingly shown, in this case notably Liszt’s Le mal du pays, part of a suite titled Years of Pilgrimage. “Our lives are like a complex musical score,” Tsukuru thinks. "Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein.”

The conclusion is characteristically open-ended, and though this fits in with the unresolved aspects of reality that Murakami has explored in almost all of his work, in this case it comes across as more functional than whimsical, a consequence of a certain tossed-off quality. Towards the end of the novel, one of Tsukuru’s friends tells him that “the truth sometimes reminds me of a city buried in sand. As time passes, the sand piles up even thicker, and occasionally it’s blown away and what's below is revealed.” That explains it: with Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, there’s too much sand and too little city.