7 Reasons Why I Read Haruki Murakami

For my birthday, my children bought me the book Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Japanese author Haruki Murakami. This was exactly the present I wanted! I am a passionate Murakami fan and I was eager to read the new novel, which would afterwards find a place of honor on my bookshelf with all the other Murakami titles I own.

The new book, which sold a million copies in Japan in its first week after being released, may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it added to my appreciation of Murakami's writing. The book is quite different from 1Q84, Murakami's strangely-titled previous novel, in that it is a more simplistic, more human story, and at 297 pages in hardcover, it is one-third 1Q84's opus length.

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki tells the "story of Tsukuru Tazaki, a young man haunted by a great loss," and this is a loss that accompanies you from the book's initial pages all the way to its somewhat unremarkable, inconclusive ending. Described as "a story of love, friendship, and heartbreak for the ages", the experience of the book would be optimized with a backdrop score of Franz Liszt's three solo piano suites "Années de pèlerinage" (French for Years of Pilgrimage), music that is mentioned repeatedly in the narrative.

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