Review: Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki

Murakami returns with a harmonious blend of naivety and riddling sophistication: The Independent, UK

Haruki Murakami, who ran a jazz bar in Tokyo before he turned to fiction, often makes music a key to unlock his world. On one level, his latest novel – at 300 pages, a mere bagatelle next to the three-movement, 1,000-page symphony of 1Q84 – honours and interprets one cornerstone of the Romantic piano repertoire. Franz Liszt’s Années de Pèlerinage, his pianistic “memoir” of youthful search and struggle, accompanies the action and reflection of this book in the form of two favoured recordings, by Lazar Berman and Alfred Brendel.