Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki: Book Group Discussion

Missed the meeting. Thanks BB for the great post. 

Tsukuru Tazaki has never formed a lasting relationship since the breakup 16 years previously of his teenage group of five friends: three guys and two girls. The others all had last name that were colors but not he, thus "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki." He feels colorless in other ways as well, an "empty vessel." A new girlfriend, Sara, insists that for their relationship to go forward he must confront his former friends and get to the bottom of why they cruelly cut him off. And so begins his pilgrimage.

Most of us liked the book and found the story pulled us right along in spite of it's being more episodic than plotted. There are dreams and stories within the story, not all of which we grasped the importance of. Characters, too, as in a real pilgrimage, were sometimes picked up and dropped without our being sure of their significance. Sara seems more of a guide or even a therapist than a fleshed-out character. The simplicity of the language adds to the mythic feeling of the story.

One member commented that the book is spiritual. The rational is challenged by the intuitive, the dreamlike, the fanciful. The line is blurred  between what really happens and what is imagined. Another member's assertion that the novel has Catholic themes was met with general merriment. (Stoutly, she cited passages about the redemptive value of suffering, the social necessity for a victim, death of an old way of life leading to eventual resurrection, the existence of evil, and the life-sustaining value of hope.)

Tsukuru, whose name means "to build" or "to create," is an engineer who designs railroad stations. One member suggested that Tsukuru is a stand-in for the writer, his pilgrimage a depiction of the writing process. Several members felt a lack of resolution at story's end. What is the significance of vestigial fingers? Do Tsukuru's dreams include events that really happened? Has he committed an act of violence? What will become of Tsukuru and Sara?

Together, we puzzled out the book's cover--each of four colors like a finger in a hand, the thumb a railroad map incorporating all four colors--and found it so apt and clever we wondered if the author himself had had a "hand" in the design.

At meeting's end, BB held up a copy of the novel which she has just published through CreateSpace. "Lulu Goes to College" by Barbara McGillicuddy Bolton is available through Amazon.