Haruki Murakami - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

“What do you want to focus on here?”

The man gave it some thought. “I don’t really know.

I don’t have any set, clear goal like you. I just want to think deeply about things. Contemplate ideas in a pure, free sort of way. That’s all. If you think about it, that’s kind of like constructing a vacuum.”

“Well, the world needs a few people who create a vacuum.”

The other man laughed happily. “Yeah, but it’s different from people growing lettuce or tomatoes. If everybody in the world worked their hardest to create a vacuum, we’d be in big trouble.”

“Ideas are like beards. Men don’t have them until they grow up. Somebody said that, but I can’t remember who.”

“Voltaire,” the younger man said. He rubbed his chin and smiled, a cheerful, unaffected smile. “Voltaire might be off the mark, though, when it comes to me. I have hardly any beard at all, but have loved thinking about things since I was a kid.”

His face was indeed smooth, with no hint of a beard. His eyebrows were narrow, but thick, his ears nicely formed, like lovely seashells.

“I wonder if what Voltaire meant wasn’t ideas as much as meditation,” Tsukuru said.

The man inclined his head a fraction. “Pain is what gives rise to meditation. It has nothing to do with age, let alone beards.”

The young man’s name was Haida, which meant, literally, “gray field.” Fumiaki Haida. Another person with a color, Tsukuru mused. Mister Gray. Though gray, of course, was a fairly subdued color.

Neither of them was very sociable, but as they continued to meet, a natural friendliness grew between them and they began to open up to each other. They decided to meet every morning and swim laps together. They both swam long distances, freestyle, though Haida was a little faster. He’d gone to a swim school since he was a child, and his swimming form was beautiful, without a single wasted motion. His shoulder blades moved smoothly, like the wings of a butterfly, barely skimming the surface. After Haida gave Tsukuru some detailed pointers, and after Tsukuru had done more strength training, he was finally able to match Haida’s speed. At first they mainly talked about swimming techniques, but later branched out into other topics.

Haida was a short but handsome young man. His face was small and narrow, like an ancient Greek statue, but his facial features were, if anything, classical, with a kind of intelligent and reserved look. He wasn’t the type of pretty young boy who immediately grabbed people’s attention, but one whose graceful beauty only became apparent over time.

Haida’s hair was short and slightly curly, and he always dressed casually in the same chinos and light-colored shirts. But despite his simple, ordinary outfit, he knew how to wear his clothes well. He loved reading above all else, and, like Tsukuru, he seldom read novels. His preferences ran to philosophy and the classics. He enjoyed reading plays, too, and was a big fan of Greek tragedies and Shakespeare. He also knew Noh and bunraku well. Haida was from Akita Prefecture in the far north of Japan. He had very white skin and long fingers. Like Tsukuru, he couldn’t hold his liquor well, but unlike Tsukuru, he was able to distinguish between the music of Mendelssohn and the music of Schumann. Haida was extremely shy, and when he was together with more than three people, he did his best to stay invisible. There was an old, deep scar, about an inch and a half long, on his neck, like he’d been cut by a knife, but this scar added a strange accent to this otherwise serene young man’s appearance.

Haida had come from Akita to Tokyo that spring and was living in a student dorm near campus, but had not yet made any friends. When the two of them discovered that they got along so well, they started to spend time together, and Haida began dropping by Tsukuru’s apartment.

“How can a student afford such an expensive condo?” Haida asked in wonder the first time he visited Tsukuru’s place.

“My father runs a real estate business in Nagoya and owns some properties in Tokyo,” Tsukuru explained. “This one happened to be vacant, so they let me live here. My second sister used to live here, but after she graduated from college she moved out and I moved in. The place is in the company’s name.”

“Your family must be pretty well off?”

“You know, I’m not really sure. Maybe—I have no idea. I don’t think even my father would know unless he assembled his accountant, lawyer, tax consultant, and investment consultant together in one room. It seems like we’re not so badly off now, which is why I can live in this kind of place. Believe me, I’m grateful.”

“But you’re not interested in the sort of business your father does?”

“No, not at all. In his line of work you’re constantly shifting capital around—from one side to another and back again. The whole thing’s way too restless for me. I’m not like him. I much prefer plugging away at building stations, even if it isn’t very profitable.”

“Your one set interest,” Haida commented, a big smile on his face.

Tsukuru ended up staying in that one-bedroom condo in Jiyugaoka even after he graduated from college and began working for a railway company headquartered in Shinjuku. When he was thirty, his father died and the condo officially became his. His father had apparently intended to give it to Tsukuru all along and unbeknownst to him had previously transferred the deed to his name. Tsukuru’s eldest sister’s husband took over his father’s company, and Tsukuru continued his work in Tokyo building railroad stations, without much contact with his family. His visits to Nagoya remained few and far between.

When he was back in his hometown for his father’s funeral, he half expected his four friends to show up to pay their condolences. He wondered how he should greet them if they did. But none of them showed up. Tsukuru felt relieved, but at the same time a little sad, and it hit him all over again: what they had had really was over. They could never go back again. All five of them were already, at this point, thirty years old—no longer the age when one dreamed of an ordered, harmonious community of friends.

About half the people in the world dislike their own name. Tsukuru happened to run across this statistic in a newspaper or magazine. He himself was in the other half—or, at least, he didn’t dislike his name. Perhaps it was more accurate to say he couldn’t imagine having a different name, or the kind of life he’d lead if he did.

The first name “Tsukuru” was officially written with a single Chinese character, though usually he spelled it out phonetically in hiragana, and his friends all thought that was how his name was written. His mother and two sisters used an alternate reading of the same character for Tsukuru, calling him Saku or Saku-chan, which they found easier.

His father had been the one who named him. Well before Tsukuru was born, his father had already decided on his name. Why was unclear. Maybe it was because his father had spent many years of his own life far removed from anything having to do with making things. Or maybe at some point he’d received something akin to a revelation—a bolt of unseen lightning, accompanied by soundless thunder, searing the name Tsukuru in his brain. But his father never spoke of where he’d gotten the idea for the name. Not to Tsukuru, and not to anybody else.

When it came to which Chinese character he would choose to write out “Tsukuru,” however—the character that meant “create,” or the simpler one that meant “make” or “build”—his father couldn’t make up his mind for the longest time. The characters might read the same way, but the nuances were very different. His mother had assumed it would be written with the character that meant “create,” but in the end his father had opted for the more basic meaning.