Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (Japanese 2013; English translation 2014) By Haruki Murakami

Wow. That one word could suffice as a description of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki And His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami, were I not so eager write more.

Mr. Murakami is a major force in literature in Japan and in English translations throughout the world. He’s also rather prolific, though this is the first work of his I’ve read. Now for a cliché: were it not for having to work, I would have read this book straight through, that’s how good it is. 

The main character is a young man named Tsukuru Tazaki who grew up in the suburbs of Nagoya, Japan. In high school he was part of a 3-guy, 2-girl clique of friends. Each of the other members of the clique have names that include a color; i.e. one of the guys is named Akamatsu, which means “red pine,” another is named Oumi, meaning “blue sea.” Tsukuru’s name means “builder.” He has no color to claim, hence the nickname of “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.” Nicknames can define you, for life.  Colorless Tsukuru developed a self-image of boring, average, nondescript.

After high school Tsukuru goes away to engineering school in Tokyo. The others enroll in universities in Nagoya. For a while, they remain as close as always, with Tsukuru frequently coming home from college on weekends to see his friends. Then suddenly Tsukuru gets the feeling he’s being left out, no calls, no emails. He comes home to find out what’s going on. No one will see him. Finally, one of them returns his calls, informing him they’ve jointly decided to expel him from their group. No explanation, just a leave us alone.

Tsukuru returns to Tokyo devastated. 

For several months he just goes through the motions of living, and considers if even that is worth the effort. Eventually, he puts it all in the past and moves on. But the experience has left a permanent scar on him, an inability to become emotionally close to anyone. 

Sixteen years later, and still single, he begins a dating relationship with a woman named Sara. She calls him out on his intimacy issue, and he explains his life story to her. Her reaction is sympathetic, but she tells him she can’t continue with him as anything more than a casual friend until he confronts his four childhood friends and seeks an answer to why they ostracized him years ago.

The remainder of the book deals with Tsukuru’s efforts to find that answer. He eventually does, but in the process opens up several other mysteries which remain unsolved after the final page, not the least of which is the status of his relationship with Sara -- all the perfect set-up for a sequel. I suspect, after researching the author, that I won’t be disappointed on that front; his first published works after all, formed a trilogy titled The Rat.

Also, from reading over the Haruki Murakami website, and through Wikipedia, I’ve learned he has a reputation of dropping lots of musical themes into his writings. In Colorless he utilizes two: one a classical recording of Franz Listz' Years of Pilgrimage as performed by Lazar Berman; the other for contrast, Elvis Presley's Viva Las Vegas.

Reviewers have noted that Murakami’s writing is very “western.” While true, I think it’s because he writes about modern Japan, not the traditional one readers might be expecting, though at least in Colorless, he tips his hat to traditional writing, making a great cultural blend.

Recommendation:  You bet.

The Mathematician's Shiva (2014) By Stuart Rojstaczer

More fun than a barrel of monkeys! Imagine being surrounded by socially awkward geeks-on-a-mission for seven days, then sprinkle in a few serious sub-plots and themes, and voila, you have a novel titled The Mathematician’s Shiva by Stuart Rojstaczer. Life (and death) is funny sometimes, and then life moves on.

The woman who dies is Rachela Karnokovitch. She was a world famous mathematician, a genius, whose colleagues worship her. Most of them, though an exceedingly bright and overly educated group of people, are not of her intellect.        

As a child, Rachela and her parents fled their native Poland in advance of the German invasion (1939) taking the only route available to them, Russia. They were sent to a refugee camp on the Barents Sea, where her mother did not survive. After the war, Rachela and her father made their way back to their village which had been annexed into the Soviet Union. School officials soon recognized her intelligence, sending her to the University of Moscow as a child prodigy. She distinguished herself academically and became a professor by age 22. She married and had a son. As time went on, she realized that no matter how intelligent she was, her academic career would be severely limited because she was a Pole, a Jew, and a woman. Eventually she defected while at a seminar in Berlin, knowing her husband and their son would figure out a way to follow – two years later they did, heading to the border on the day Joseph Stalin died, knowing the Soviet guards, along with the rest of the country, would be distracted with their mass grief.  

The family eventually re-united and ended up at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. There, Rachela joined the faculty and re-established her academic and intellectual credentials, though still battled with institutionalized sexism. 

Her Russian-born, American-raised son Sasha narrates the book.

At the time of her death, there was a rumor spreading rapidly in academic circles that Rachela had solved a century old problem, the famed Navier-Stokes equation – a proof she apparently decided to take to the grave with her. While mathematicians from around the globe descended on Madison to celebrate her life, they also came to hopefully uncover the Navier-Stokes proof among her papers. During the shiva they searched her home, ripping up floor boards, looking behind pictures, ransacking the attic, and even at one point attempted to interrogate Pascha, her Polish-speaking parrot. Shasha put a halt to their insistence on an open casket.

Eulogizing Rachela with this book also gives the author ample opportunity to provide insight into her family as a whole. From Sasha we learn of the challenges of being an immigrant in the U.S., the difficulties of being the son of a genius, and are offered an interesting subplot when his child from his short-term marriage, who he is aware of but has never met, attends the funeral. Another character who plays an outsized role in the story is Shlomo, Rachela's brother.

While the field of mathematics may have its equations, so too the field of literature has many classic formulas – one of which is using a funeral as the setting for a story. Rachela Kornokovitch mastered the mathematic equation.  Using the voice of Sasha, Stuart Rojstaczer has expertly mastered the shiva.