40  Japan – Murakami Haruki – Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage – October 2016 (Score 8.25)

As the story opened Tsukuru Tazaki was feeling suicidal, and had been for some time. We get some background. He had been a member of an extremely close group of five, him, two other boys and two girls, all of them from Nagoya. They did everything together, having started doing voluntary work with children while they were at school. This made them very close.

The crux of the story was that the other four had names which included a colour, while he didn’t. His name meant “doer or maker”. The boys’ names were Akamatsu (red pine tree) and Oumi (Blue Sea), while the girls’ were Shirano (White Root) and Kurono (Black Field). Japanese names generally have a meaning, often related to where the family was living at the time of the ending of the Shogunate after which families had to take surnames.

Sometime during Tsukuru’s first year at university in Tokyo the other members of the group cut him off completely, without warning, and with no further contact. After that he started having weird dreams, or maybe hallucinations.

He met a girl called Sara one night in a bar and discussed it with her. She tried, and failed, to persuade him to take action about it, and he fell back into his old ways. Some months later she phoned Tsukuru and when they met, finally persuaded him to go to try to see them. She did some research for him and discovered the present whereabouts of the four “colourful” friends.

The rest of the book is concerned with him following these trails and their final outcomes. As well as these four mysteries there is the final mystery of whether he will eventually get together with Sara. I’m telling you nothing more, but I guarantee you will enjoy the book when you decide to read it.

I gave it a score of eight out of ten.