Chalk up some of Haruki Murakami’s rock-star status to the way he evokes the self-pitying narcissism of youth. At 65, Mr. Murakami can still channel the agonies of a high school student who thought that he and his four best friends were the center of the universe — until the cruel, fateful day when the friends stopped speaking to him for no apparent reason.

As “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” begins, the title character is at death’s door because of this sudden rejection. And the author is tossing around phrases like “bowels of death,” “thick cloud of nothingness” and “dark, stagnant void.” It would help if we knew just what kind of Eden Tsukuru had been cast out of, but no. This book is as short on explanations as it is long on overwrought adolescent emotion.

And either Mr. Murakami or his translator, Philip Gabriel, likes to bludgeon each new thought with brutal repetition. So the main thing we know about the self-important five friends is that “like an equilateral pentagon, where all sides are the same length, their group’s formation had to be composed of five people exactly — any more or less wouldn’t do. They believed that this was true.”

The other four all have names that denote colors in Japanese. Next April, when Mr. Murakami’s fans lather up about why he deserves a Nobel Prize in Literature, maybe they will cite that as meaningful. But here it is just one more reason for Colorless Tsukuru to feel sorry for himself, because he has lost two male friends, Aka (short and stubborn) and the gung-ho Ao (“Losing is not an option!”) and two female ones, Shiro (tall and slim, with a doll’s look) and Kuro (less beautiful, but smarter).