Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2013

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Chapters 16-19

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 13 Summary

Prior to his departure for Finland to see Kuro, Tsukuru is swimming laps at the familiar pool. It allows him to calm his thoughts and concentrate just on the rhythm of the motion of his swim strokes. While swimming laps, he sees the feet of another swimmer and immediately feels that they belong to Haida. After he finishes, he waits on the pool deck, but the man turns out not to be Haida.

Tsukuru chats with Sara, who asks him if he will try to contact Kuro ahead of his trip, which he insists on not doing. They promise to see each other once he returns. A few days later, while shopping for a gift to bring to Kuro, Tsukuru sees Sara walking and holding hands with a man in his fifties. What bothers Tsukuru the most is that she is laughing and smiling. He feels sorrow, not jealousy at seeing Sara with another man. At home, Tsukuru decides to play the Liszt record, and as he does so, the memories of Shiro and Haida return to him.

Chapter 14 Summary

Tsukuru arrives in Helsinki and takes a cab to the hotel that Sara set up for him. After settling in his hotel room, Tsukuru calls Kuro’s residence and gets an answering machine. The recorded message is in Finnish, the man’s voice presumably belonging to Kuro’s husband. Tsukuru then calls Sara’s travel agency. The contact person, a woman named Olga, is about to close but can meet him in the lobby of his hotel. Olga translates the voicemail recording, and it turns out, as Sara suspected could happen, that Kuro’s family is away on vacation. The message contains a number where they can be reached. Tsukuru is adamant that his presence stay secret, so Olga eventually calls the number, fibbing to Kuro’s husband that she is a Fed-ex driver delivering a package who needs help with the address. The trick works. Olga suggests that Tsukuru visit the travel agency in the morning and then leaves him at the hotel. He wanders Helsinki for a little while in search of food. That night he hopes that he will once more dream of Shiro, but he does not.

Chapter 15 Summary

The next morning, Tsukuru arrives at the travel agency. Olga has arranged a rental car for him, and she gives him the map with the location of Kuro’s cottage marked with an X, some 100 km away. As he gets close to the cottage, he has some difficulty finding it. A passing old man on a bicycle stops to offer assistance. After finally finding the summer cottage, Tsukuru composes himself and approaches the house. He is greeted first by a dog and then by a man who speaks fluent Japanese but appears to be Scandinavian. The man, Kuro’s husband Edvard Haatainen, kindly greets Tsukuru and welcomes him inside. Edvard met Kuro while studying Japanese pottery in Nagoya. Kuro, who is now called Eri, has taken her kids for a walk out by the lake, but should be back soon. In the meantime, Tsukuru takes the time to look at the pottery that Edvard and Eri have made, and as Edvard suggests, he is able to distinguish which of them made which piece. The chapter closes as Eri arrives back at the cottage.

Chapters 13-15 Analysis

The pain of rejection returns to Tsukuru’s life when he sees Sara out walking with another man. Tsukuru is not overcome by jealousy or rage. Instead, he feels sadness at the fact that Sara seems so much happier with the other man, than she was with him. This stark contrast produces feelings of inferiority, though Tsukuru also has an important epiphany about the pain he feels: “being able to feel pain was good, he thought. It’s when you can’t even feel any pain anymore that you’re in real trouble” (194). The apathy brought about by rejection in his earlier life has been replaced by something more conducive to The Formation of Self. Tsukuru embraces the idea that experiencing pain is an important part of being human. This realization underscores Aka’s odd analogy, that life means having the freedom to choose which kind of pain one experiences—having your toenails or finger nails ripped out. The point isn’t avoiding pain, but being able to direct yourself to the kind of pain you can cope with.

The limits of what language can ultimately express come to the fore when Tsukuru arrives in Finland. Complications about communicating and being understood pile up here. Tsukuru refuses to let Kuro know that he is coming, hoping that his physical presence will work better than a call beforehand. Sara’s friend Olga and Tsukuru have a language barrier: Both are speaking English, with the implication that things are getting lost in the translation. Kuro and her husband live a bilingual lifestyle, but the differences between their pottery works indicate that even this kind of overlap hasn’t created a complete merging. Olga gestures to the difficulty of true communication more broadly when she says, “some things in life are too complicated to explain in any language” (207). The novel suggests that language may not be able to express individual experiences of pain, suffering, or the robust nature of our interior experiences. When Tsukuru and Kuro meet, they embrace each other wordlessly. The exchange of feeling, the suffering and regret they both feel, takes place intuitively and on a deeper plane than what language can offer.