Tsukuru has fallen “into the bowels of death”—“lost in a dark, stagnant void”—because his four closest friends have abruptly, without explanation, stopped speaking to him and disappeared from his life. These aren’t ordinary friendships. Tsukuru belongs to a group of two girls and three boys who, since meeting in high school, have created a closed world all their own. They form a single cohesive unit, or as Murakami puts it, “a centripetal unit.” Tsukuru’s friends are a jock, an intellectual, a shy pianist, and a sarcastic joker; their surnames all contain the name of a color: red pine, black field, white foot, and blue sea. Only Tazaki is colorless.

There’s nothing special about me. I’m totally normal.

I had no such ambition … there was nothing I wanted to be.

An average … single male. A child of his times.

A guy leading a perfectly ordinary existence.

I’m just an ordinary guy, living an ordinary life.

The basic questions tugged at me: Who am I? What am I searching for? Where am I headed?

Each of these lines describes the protagonist of a previous Murakami novel, but all apply to Tsukuru, who is the only member of his quintet “without anything special about him.” He has “no particular defects to speak of” and “not one single quality … that was worth bragging about … Everything about him was middling, pallid, lacking in color.”

Nearly 20 years after his friends’ disappearing act and his subsequent depression, Tsukuru is encouraged by Sara, his new girlfriend, to figure out what happened to his former companions. She volunteers to help and soon tracks them down, using a detective tool heretofore untapped by Tsukuru: the Internet. (“I’m familiar with Google and Facebook,” he says. “But I hardly ever use them. I’m just not interested.” Even for a novelist as drawn to the fantastical as Murakami, this is a bit far-fetched.) Murakamians will, at this point, expect our hero to travel into some subterranean wonderland—perhaps through the conduit of an elevator, a subway track, or a telephone booth—to find his lost friends.

But in Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, Murakami’s mystical Technicolor lightship never achieves liftoff. His approach is instead uncharacteristically terrestrial. Tsukuru visits each of the three surviving members of his group in turn, discovering that they have normal jobs and careers. One makes pottery; another runs a corporate training center; the third sells cars. Tsukuru quickly discovers the reason for their sudden dismissal of him—a reason that is unfair, and not Tsukuru’s fault, but legitimate nonetheless. In its melancholy tranquility, the novel is most reminiscent of South of the Border, West of the Sun (1999) and Sputnik Sweetheart (2001)—quiet, restrained works that, despite metaphysical elements, never fully abandon themselves to the supernatural. Those novels, following Dance Dance Dance (1994) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997), served as a kind of palate cleanser, a return to plausibility; Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki, following the maximalist pyrotechnics of 1Q84, has a similar texture. There is no Sheep Man, dream library, or child psychic. There is only a single moon in the Tokyo sky.