EMPTY VESSELS: MURAKAMI HARUKI'S 'COLOURLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI'

In Murakami's ;latest novel, a colourless man who considers himself to be an empty vessel, is rejected by his close-knit group of high school friends at the age of twenty. Out of the group of five friends he is the only one to leave Nagoya to pursue his studies in Tokyo. He wishes to become an engineer specialising in the construction of railway stations. Hence the significance of his name Tsukuru, which means 'to make'.

 

The notion of being an empty vessel is significant in Murakami's writing. In the first story in After the Quake, Komura agrees to take a small box to Hokkaido. When he arrives in Hokkaido he doesn’t feel like he has come a long way. What is interesting about the box is that it appears to contain nothing. After his wife leaves him Komura reads in her letter that although he is good and kind, “living with you is like living with a chunk of air”. At the end of the story, after failing to get an erection, Komura is told by the mysterious Shimao, “That box contains the something that was in you”. Having felt he has come a long way Shimao tells him “But really, you’re just at the beginning. In Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki, Tsukuru finds himself close to death for a period of six months but he recovers and notices that his face has changed. He finishes his studies, finds work and has several girlfriends but there is nothing permanent in his life. It is not until he meets Sara, who forces him to make contact with his old friends that he lost sixteen years ago, that he uncovers the truth about the past and is able to confront his unresolved feelings. On of the triggers that sets him on this course of action is his failure to get an erection. Having taken Sara home she had "reached out and gently took his hard penis in her hand... But a little later, as he was entering her, his penis went limp. It was the first time in his life that this had happened to him and, and it left him baffled and mystified." It is a mystification that deepens...

As events are uncovered, his dreams parallel and inform the events that unfold. He has lurid sexual fantasies about the two girls in the group. Whilst he is caressed by and has sex with both of them, he only ever ejaculates inside Shiro. It turns out that Shiro had a horror of sex. Her father was a doctor who performed abortions. When she was raped, she blames Tsukuru. Even though Kuro knows that this is a false accusation, she stands by Shiro because she feels whilst Shiro is weak and needs protection, Tsukuru is strong and can survive. As she explains to Tsukuru, sixteen years later, when he comes to find her in Finland, she figured that he was a survivor. Later, Shiro has a miscarriage and moves to Hamamatsu. It is here that she is strangled to death. Tsukuru was not told about this at the time. He feels that he was in some way responsible and so was possibly the reason for her death. Kuro feels the same way. It turns out that she was also in love with Tsukuru at the time which made her feel even worse.

In the period before he re-established contact with his old friends, Tsukuru met  a man at the local swimming pool named Haida. Haida tells him the story about his father who had a death charm. He always carried package with him which he placed on the piano before he played. When Haida disappeared from Tsukuru's life, he sees it as yet another example of  how people abandon him for little or no reason. He is afraid of losing Sara and so puts together the pieces of his past so that he can be together with her. When they have sex she feels that he is absent. Later on he comes to feel that  he has a lump inside him which needs to melt.

As an engineer, Tsukuru builds train stations, these are designed for safety as people are transported across the system. In Tokyo, the centre piece of this system is Shinjuku station. The fact that 3.5 million people use this station each day makes it the busiest station in the world. He loves stations and often sits in them to observe passengers in transit. He reflects on the famous photo that depicts a wave of Japanese commuters, head down and looking pensive, which an American photographer had taken. The idea was that even though they had experienced an economic miracle, they were unhappy. Tsukuru feels that this hypothesis missed the point. It gave no context for the look on their faces. The reality was that, given the volume of people in the system, there is a need to keep moving. If someone trips or loses a shoe the results could be catastrophic.

Finally, as events unfold, there is a musical motif provided throughout the novel. The characters listen to a piece of music Mal de Pays by Lizst which Shiro used to play on the piano. Tsukuru listens to one recording given to him by Haida whilst Kuro listens to another. These are quite different interpretations which leads to a reflection on the nature of music and the reading and interpretation of musical notes. This leads to a raised awareness of birds and bird song in the novel. Birds make an appearance regularly and it is through their songs that they make their presence felt. Tsukuru observes in Finland that, "The cries of the birds made for an unusual melody. The same melody pierced the woods, over and over." Kuro (now called Eri) says, "The parent birds are teaching their babies how to chirp... Until I came here I never knew that." Tsukuru decides that:

"Our lives are a complex musical score... Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. Its next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's minds be so convoluted?

The novel ends with a conversation at 4 a.m.. Sara has agreed to meet Tsukuru the following day. He has asked her if she is seeing someone else. She has asked for three days before she gives him her answer. Eri's advice to Tsukuru is, "... make sure you hang on to Sara. You really need her." Presumably the fact finding that he has been engaged in will enable him to  conquer his erectile dysfunction, but there are no guarantees that she will choose him. In Tsukuru's world of railway stations, "Everything proceeds smoothly, efficiently, without a hitch, down to the second." But the reality is that there are aberrations in life such as having six fingers. Luckily, whilst these might be the product of a dominant gene, these are "nothing more than one among many elements in tendency distribution."