Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is a warm, very human story about the quest for belonging, both to others and to ourselves. With devastating loss and emptiness as a starting point, the novel charts the way we build our world and map it back home, however we define it.

The narrative follows several years of protagonist Tsukuru Tazaki’s life, from high school to his mid-thirties. In high school, he has four best friends, two guys and two girls , that are closer than family. Each of his friends has a colour in their name. Likewise, his world is vibrant and anchored. When he goes to university in Tokyo, the rest of them stay back in Nagoya. Inexplicably, they soon cut him off completely, leaving him adrift. He gets so depressed that he undergoes a stark and permanent physical change, his face transforming into sharp lines and angles, his body a landscape of despair. Emotionally, he is unable to form deep lasting relationships for over a decade until he meets Sara, his girlfriend in the present day. In order to overcome his emotional blockages so that he can keep her, he travels far and wide, meeting his old friends to seek closure and healing. In other words, he begins unraveling the formerly impenetrable knot that is himself.

A motif in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage is that of building or making things. His name ‘Tsukuru’ means ‘to build or to make’. Fittingly, he works building subway stations in Tokyo. The stations he has always been attracted to are the non-obtrusive and unspectacular ones. These stations symbolise how Tsukuru sees himself— a place where people pass through before moving on. Unable to recognise his value, he sees himself as a stepping stone of sorts, invisible and unimportant. He believes that as the ‘colourless’ member of his group, he has nothing to offer. However, as he reconnects with his friends, they affirm that he was paramount to the group’s existence. Without Tsukuru as their cornerstone, the group eventually fell apart. Like the stations he loves, he is undeniably essential. His conversations with his friends and girlfriend and personal moments of deep reflection thus comprise his pilgrimage. Piece by piece, Tsukuru builds himself up from the rubble of trauma and abandonment. He goes from being adrift and isolated to learning risk-taking and vulnerability, and becomes capable of deep, meaningful relationships once more.

A particular poetic detail stands out to me: Tsukuru admits to Sara that when he is done building a subway station, he signs his name into the concrete, albeit in a spot invisible to the public eye. Others may shape the ways we build ourselves; they come and go; they accept and reject us. Nevertheless, our journey remains highly personal, with many lonely and unseen struggles. What we build is— ultimately— all our own.