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I'll call our main character TT, after his name in the title. TT has a wonderful group of high school friends, three boys and two girls, who form a clique in which they are a world unto themselves. They are indeed a pentagram of best friends forever. The group does everything together and they deliberately avoid any romantic attachments to each other, knowing that this will break up their group.



SOME MINOR SPOILERS FOLLOW BUT MAJOR ONES ARE HIDDEN

TT is the only guy who leaves their hometown of Nagoya and goes off to college in Tokyo. But he returns in the summers and on holidays and the friendship continues. Then one time when he comes home for the holidays none of the other four will return his calls. Finally he gets one of them to call him back and the young man says, in effect, ‘We don't want anything more to do with you. Stop calling us. You know what you did.' CLICK.

TT is devastated. He has no idea what he did. (view spoiler)[ He manages to complete his degree and becomes an architect in Tokyo designing railroad stations. He dates women occasionally, but nothing serious. (hide spoiler)] His life remains ‘colorless� � an old joke among the five-some that he was the only one who didn’t have a Japanese name that had some reference to a color in it.

To an extent, TT is indeed a bit colorless. He has a bit of that (incorrect) stereotype about engineers that he’s a math guy and lacks social graces. His conversation certainly is colorless. He’s slow on repartee. The other person always makes the witty remark and TT thinks an hour later or a day later of what he could have said to keep the conversation going. “He thought he should say something, but no words came.�

TT’s idea of a good time is sitting in a railroad station watching the trains come and go. He has a good job but we won’t see TT anytime soon on a list of top 100 hot Tokyo bachelors. (view spoiler)[ TT is aware of this. He’s a bright guy, not clueless. He just accepts himself as a ‘colorless empty vessel.� He thinks, ‘why would any woman want me?� (hide spoiler)]



Fast forward 16 years. TT is falling in love with a woman. She’s interested in something long-term too but she recognizes that he’s ‘not there� when they make love. Something’s bugging him, so he tells her his story of the five friends.

She insists that he has to go see all of them and find out what happened. TT doesn’t even know where they are. She’s a social media whiz (TT of course knows nothing about Facebook, etc.) so she tracks them down. TT goes off to visit all of them, including one who now lives in Finland. And we get shocked as much as TT does by the various things he finds out.

The tension in the last third of the book is: will this cure TT of his malaise? And if it does will the woman now commit to the relationship? (view spoiler)[ He discovers she has another male friend. She tells him ‘I’ll let you know in a week.� (hide spoiler)]

In this process we see how people change when you haven’t seen them for 16 years. Some of the four look and act just like they did years ago; others seem to have had a change not only in appearance but in personality. This range of change seems very true to me from my experiences in meeting people again years later.

The author is known for mixing into his stories fantasy and magical realism. We do get that a bit in a couple of stories-within-the-story. Tales told by fathers of friends about passing dead people in the fog and ‘death tokens� that you can pass on to someone else. But TT’s story is mostly devoid of fantasy except in his dreams.

One other thing: music. The author tells us a lot about classical Western music; not just symphonies and composers but even about which artist's or orchestra’s performance of a piece he prefers. So I added this book to my music shelf.

I liked the story and the writing, although it was straightforward writing, not too literary or special in any way. I liked TT, the main character - he grew on me. I empathized with him, but I thought it was a bit of a stretch that TT could go for 16 years without trying to find out what it was that made his friends turn against him. So that knocked it down a notch in realism for me.



Colorless TT is Murakami’s fifth most popular book by ratings and reviews on GR. First is Norwegian Wood, then Kafka, Wind-Up Bird and 1Q84. It’s a bit lower-rated than the others, but still high - a 3.9 compared to 4.0 or 4.1 for the ratings of the others.

Top photo of Nagoya street scene from youtube.com
Tokyo subway map from bento.com
The author (1949-) from andersen-award.org

[Edited 4/27/23]