Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage cover art

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

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Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

By: Philip Gabriel - translator, Haruki Murakami
Narrated by: Bruce Locke
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About this listen

Brought to you by Penguin.

A mesmerising mystery story about friendship from the internationally best-selling author of Norwegian Wood and 1Q84.

Tsukuru Tazaki had four best friends at school. By chance all of their names contained a colour. The two boys were called Akamatsu, meaning 'red pine', and Oumi, 'blue sea', while the girls' names were Shirane, 'white root', and Kurono, 'black field'. Tazaki was the only last name with no colour in it.

One day Tsukuru Tazaki's friends announced that they didn't want to see him, or talk to him, ever again.

Since that day Tsukuru has been floating through life, unable to form intimate connections with anyone. But then he meets Sara, who tells him that the time has come to find out what happened all those years ago.

©2013 Haruki Murakami (P)2021 Penguin Audio Coming of Age Fiction Friendship Genre Fiction Literary Fiction

Critic Reviews

Long-listed, I.M.P.A.C. Dublin Award, 2016

Long-listed, Independent Foreign Fiction Prize, 2015
All stars
Most relevant  
The reader is good, but why oh why is all the dialogue spoken in that awful “Japanese” accent?? Really yanks the listener out of the story. A ridiculous decision - producers, please don’t ever do anything like this again, it’s mortifying. I’m persisting because I can’t find another recording of this novel, but gosh, what a misstep. I feel sorry for the voice actor.

Fake Japanese accent UNBEARABLE

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has the aura of the usual Murakami book, but unfortunately the real crux of the story falls a bit flat, the irony of it is that the character of tsukuru never does seem to recover/ gain any colour since the initial split, which is a pretty depressing look at overcoming grief. And if that was the point then fine, but if it was intentional, then the theme seems to be that sometimes you can just never recover who you really were and if you experience significant pain, sometimes you will never recover your true self. And that's a pretty harsh takeaway.

Also, the narrator doesn't put on different voices in any real discernable way for the different characters so it can be confusing as to who is reading at times. The performance wasn't bad to the point I felt it really distracted from the story, but it did not improve it.

fantastically written but falls short

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This book is a fantastic story however the narration had this odd accent which was off putting the entire time a character spoke. The story line was textbook Murakami which was very enjoyable and relaxing.

The voice of the narrator was terrible but the story was really good

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A very compelling story that kept me engaged throughout the whole book and so well read. I read it on a random recommendation and what a good one that was. One of the best performance reads out there.

Not a samurai self help book

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I had to stop listening after an hour. The sample didn't reveal the fake awful pseudo Japanese accents. why oh why, I wish I could get my credit back. The story sounds good and I will definitely read the book but this performance is absolutely awful. Culturally paternalistic.

fake Japanese accents totally wreck this novel

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