A phone call and life can change, on the positive side but above all on the negative side. This is what happens to the main character of Haruki Murakami’s book “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage“: an exciting and profound novel that drives the reader to reflect on the value of happiness and the ability to recover in difficult times.
A phone call, as we said. This was enough to upset the existence of the main character, before well-adjusted in a group of friends since the time of high-school and then abandoned without a real explanation. It’s precisely there where we could find his pain: into uncertainty, in the unmotivated abandonment and in the difficulty to understand what happened.
Tsukuru Tazaki between pain and renaissance
Life for Tsukuru Tazaki is difficult and the pain is intense: he lashes out and spends whole months wondering about the reason for that cursed decision taken by his friends. He finds rare moments of salvation only by thinking about suicide: an act that fortunately he never made. The pain remains but life goes on: the protagonist sees himself different day by day, phisically but above all in the soul. A new acquaintance, as a dividing line between the past and the future, will push him to make new sense of his existence and finally find the answers to the question that had obsessed him for so many years.
In the 16 years since that abandonment, Tsukuru Tazaki had never wanted to look for his old friends, he simply shut himself off from the world with his pain and desperation. He took refuge in a life made of work and few other satisfactions, both personal and sentimental. But the meeting with Sara will take him out of the shell and spur him to look again for stability, so he can close with his past and finally go forward. Each of us has overcome or will overcome moments of difficulty: it is at that moment that it becomes necessary to find the time to reflect, to put together the pieces, look inside ourselves and rediscover the deep meaning of all things, but above all of ourselves. This means going forward. This means, perhaps, trying to achieve happiness.
