Why Colorless?
Because Tsukuru Tazaki's name doesn't refer to a color, as do the names of the four close friends he had back in school. Because, as a typical Murakami protagonist, he doesn't have any distinguishing "color" at all; there's nothing exaggerated about him as a character; he's a facilitator of others, a perfect foil, an understanding ear, a voice of moderation.
Tsukuru—his name meaning "maker"—is a 36-year-old builder of railway stations. His life in Tokyo is calm, uneventful, a seesaw at perfect equilibrium, with neither ups nor downs.
That's the problem.
Is there any point to being on a see-saw that never goes up or down? That isn't the proper use of playground equipment or a life. Clearly Tsukuru isn't playing along, isn't really living at all.
Tsukuru has reached that archetypal middle-point in life's journey that Dante made famous. He can't seem to go forward or backward and standing still, as he has been doing, has become intolerable. His paralysis stems from the breakup of that group of friends he had back in school. One day they decided to cast him out without explanation. Tsukuru, being the obliging guy that he is, never demanded one. He accepted his exile without protest, went on his way, but the wound that he suffered never healed.
Living in Color
It's only when he meets and falls in love with Sara that he realizes he must finally confront the past; specifically, he must go back and discover the reason that his friends all turned on him. Actually, it's Sara who realizes that Tsukuru needs to make this journey and Tsukuru, desperate not to lose her, becomes convinced that she is right.
The bulk of the novel recounts Tsukuru's reunion with his old group. One by one he visits them, with one notable exception, and learns the disturbing reason for his banishment. But the apparent mystery solved, others, unsolvable, arise and that is where Murakami proves himself to be more than just a popular spinner of tales. For it isn't so much what happened and who did what to whom, but the why that forever eludes a neat and conclusive explanation. Life is, in the end, a mystery with too many valid hypotheses to ever solve. Sometimes it isn't a simple a matter of what we do or don't do that determines our guilt or innocence, but of being unable to control what we think or dream or desire that makes us complicit in, if not entirely responsible, for the tragedies that befall ourselves and others. Is it possible that without your conscious knowledge some dark part of you, born of anger, grief, disappointment, jealousy, or desire which you'd never consciously act on slips out in the night in spite of you and commits some heinous act that the "victim" actually calls to herself through her own equally unacknowledged desire for self-destruction?
In a Murakami novel it's entirely possible.
Nothing Black or White
We are left with enigma. "Far off in the distance," Murakami writes, "he heard a helicopter. It seemed to be getting nearer, the sound growing louder. He looked up at the sky, trying to catch sight of it. It felt like a messenger bringing some vital news. But he never saw it, the sound of propellers fading, then disappearing completely to the west, leaving behind only the soft, vague hum of the city at night."
The all-enlightening answer to the mystery sometimes seems to be right on the verge of dawning…and then slips back into darkness. That, Murakami says in one way or another throughout this novel, is just the way it is.
At one point, near the end of his tale, Tsukuru has a dream-vision. He's playing a challenging piano piece in front of a large audience that grows more and more inattentive as his performance proceeds. Eventually, among the noise of the discomfited, impatient audience, his playing is altogether drowned out. He can hardly blame them, though; the piece is beyond his skill to execute, beyond comprehension not only in practice, but in theory as well. Later, he reflects, "Our lives are like a complex musical score. Filled with all sorts of cryptic writing, sixteenth and thirty-second notes and other strange signs. It's next to impossible to correctly interpret these, and even if you could, and then could transpose them into the correct sounds, there's no guarantee that people would correctly understand, or appreciate, the meaning therein. No guarantee it would make people happy. Why must the workings of people's lives be so convoluted?"
Still, Tsukuru (and Murakami, now 64) concludes, he has to keep playing this music until "the score was over, he couldn't spare a moment's glance away. Even if there wasn't a single person now who was still listening." There is no other choice, no other way to live meaningfully.
Each of our lives is the perch on which we sing. There is nothing else to do. Even if our song ultimately goes unheard.
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