Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
by Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel
Knopf, 386 pp., $25.95
In considering the life and work of Haruki Murakami it’s good to keep a sharp eye on the relationship between individual and community, on questions of inclusion and exclusion, belonging and abandonment. Grandson of a Buddhist monk, his father a teacher of Japanese literature, Murakami has made a point of writing outside the Japanese tradition, against it almost, drawing to a large extent on tropes, images, and cultural references from Western literature, classical music, and pop culture. In this respect he has been praised for, but also accused of, pioneering a new global literature whose stories, whether real, surreal, or “magical,” are not radically located in any place…