Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

By Haruki Murakami; translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel

(Alfred A. Knopf; 386 pages; $25.95)

The "pilgrimage" of Haruki Murakami's latest novel, "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage," translates literally as a "reverent perambulation." In this traditional Japanese practice, one dons white robes symbolic of ascetic simplicity, leaves excess baggage behind and gives oneself over to the rhythms and vicissitudes of travel. The pilgrimage makes a fine metaphor for its hero's journey, but perhaps an even better one for the author's.

Murakami has won international audiences and prizes by writing a kind of shamanistic science fiction of everyday life. Like most of his work, from the cyberpunk-fantasy-detective hybrid "Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World" to the unwieldy and otherworldly three-volume marathon "1Q84," this new novel chronicles a spiritual quest that might also be a love story. But here the author strips away the magical quavers of reality and the mind-bending plot structures that have become hallmarks of his work. He offers instead a down-to-earth examination of isolation and intimacy so elementary that it feels more like minimalist art than the complex, wind-up creations he usually produces.

Tsukuru Tazaki has been brutally expelled, without explanation, from the close-knit circle of friends that had been his entire world. He always felt rather blank, devoid of personality in comparison with the colorful others; now this feeling consumes him. He avoids suicide only by clinging to a minimal routine of life: eating as little as possible, attending classes, walking, swimming and sleeping. With time, the momentum of these basic activities proves somehow salutary in itself. Tsukuru finds himself carried into intersections with the routines of others, such as the philosophical young man Haida (literally "gray field") who swims in front of him, and the attractive, keenly perceptive travel coordinator Sara Kimoto.

A runner himself, Murakami has always been interested in the circuits we make in our minds, over the planet, and into or out of each other's lives. In this book, spiritual and interpersonal work requires physical effort, beginning with seemingly small behaviors that create new pathways of thinking and relating. Reading gives you the sense that something as simple as listening to a certain record or going off one's usual path to shop for a gift can permanently change your life - a possibility that infuses the trivial with potentially grand meaning. As Haida observes, "what is important in life is always the things that are secondary."

To work out his intimacy issues in the present, Tsukuru resolves to confront those who rejected him years earlier. The effort takes him back to his hometown and eventually out of Japan altogether in search of Red, Blue, White and Black - the nicknames of former friends who have found their way to richly symbolic vocations (from corporate brainwashing to teaching music), and who provide Tsukuru with pieces of what turns out to be the metaphysical puzzle of his past.

Tsukuru's situation will resonate with anyone who feels adrift in this age of Google and Facebook. The wealth of information about the colorful lives of others can leave us feeling blank in comparison. But for Murakami, it is precisely such vacuity that creates the possibility for moving patterns.

Tsukuru designs train stations for a living. He meditates on how seemingly empty architectural spaces allow crowds of passengers to fall into step or traverse paths without the conflict and damage he has experienced on the smaller scale of his personal life. This becomes the model for Tsukuru's own internal renovations; rather than despairing at the hollowness he feels inside, he realizes that he must shape that space to accept the flow of connections and departures that intimacy entails. This is also the model for the novel itself, as the stylish subway-themed artwork by Chipp Kidd and Maggie Hinders makes clear.

Readers find themselves propelled along by the ebb and flow of an internal logic that feels as much like a musical progression as it does an unfolding of events. The steady calm of the prose, the ambient rhythms of recurring motifs like Fraz Liszt's "Le Mal du Pays," and the close attention to repetitive patterns in characters' lives bring readers into a carefully measured cadence like that of Tsukuru's pared-down lifestyle.

Murakami can turn an oddly evocative phrase, as when he writes of a limb recently vacated by a bird: "Like a distraught mind, the branch quivered, then returned to stillness." But more often than not, he chooses a kind of commonplace simplicity that keeps pages turning. One chapter begins by repeating the unremarkable last sentence of the previous chapter, "He met the man at the college pool."

The effect is to produce a drumbeat that fades into the background while everything else organizes around that repetition. Thanks to Philip Gabriel's discerning translation into subtle yet artful language, the novel reads like a Brian Eno song; its ease and obviousness convey an internal complexity that you "get" without realizing it.

This book still gives readers all the mythic proportions and trademark elements of Murakami's earlier writing. It brims with tantalizing possibilities: a supernatural tale-within-a-tale, a crossroads deal with a demon, biological oddities, vanishing people, erotic and violent dreams that reach into reality, and even a tragic and eerie murder mystery. Yet in this work these bold and colorful threads of fiction blur smoothly together to form the muted white of an almost ordinary realism. Like J.M. Coetzee, Murakami smoothly interlaces allegorical meanings with everyday particulars of contemporary social reality. The shadows cast may be larger than life, but the figures themselves feel stirringly human.

There is, for example, Blue, the former jock, current Lexus salesman whose cell phone plays Elvis Presley's "Viva Las Vegas" - and who conveys with uncommon perspicacity, if also discomfiture, how sad it was "to see what used to be so fundamental to our lives fade away, and disappear." And there is the furious-looking old man who does Tsukuru a great kindness, spits solemnly and departs. We leave such characters with a sense of concealed depth beneath provocative exteriors, but also the distinct impression that it is the surface encounter that matters most. The same is true of the book; much remains enigmatic, but by the end of this journey we have learned to take that in stride, even with reverence.

Christopher Weinberger is an assistant professor of comparative and world literature at San Francisco State University. E-mail: books@sfchronicle.com