Tsukuru Quotes & Sayings

Tsukuru visited railroad stations like other people enjoy attending concerts, watching movies, dancing in clubs, watching sports, and window shopping. When he was at loose ends, with nothing to do, he headed to a station. — Haruki Murakami

To fill in the silence Tsukuru lowered the needle onto the record again, went back to the sofa, and settled in to listen to the music. This time he tried his best not to think of anything in particular. With his eyes closed and his mind a blank, he focused solely on the music. Finally, as if lured in by the melody, images flashed behind his eyelids, one after the next, appearing, then disappearing. A series of images without concrete form or meaning, rising up from the dark margins of consciousness, soundlessly crossing into the visible realm, only to be sucked back into the margins on the other side and vanish once again. Like the mysterious outline of microorganisms swimming across the circular field of vision of a microscope. — Haruki Murakami

I really should have died then, Tsukuru often told himself. Then this world, the one in the here and now, wouldn't exist. It was a captivating, bewitching thought. The present world wouldn't exist, and reality would no longer be real. As far as this world was concerned, he would simply no longer exist - just as this world would no longer exist for him. — Haruki Murakami

Everyone was boarding a night train, heading to a far-off destination. Tsukuru envied them. At least they had a place they needed to go to. — Haruki Murakami

You're always Tsukuru," Eri said, and laughed quietly. "So I don't mind. The Tsukuru who makes things. Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. — Haruki Murakami

In this dream, he burnt with desire for a woman. It was not clear who she was. She was just there. And she had a special ability to separate her body and her heart. I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru. My body or my heart. But you can't have both. You need to choose one or the other, right now. I will give the other part to someone else, she said. But Tsukuru wanted all of her. — Haruki Murakami

It's getting late. If you're sleepy I can finish this later. No, it's fine, Tsukuru said. I'm not sleepy. In fact, he'd gotten his second wind, and wanted to hear the rest of the story. — Haruki Murakami

She took Tsukuru's business card, her whole face lighting up in a smile, then pushed an extension number on her phone as if pressing the soft nose of an oversized dog. — Haruki Murakami

What did you expect? Tsukuru asked himself. A basically empty vessel has become empty once again. Who can you complain to about that? People come to him, discover how empty he is, and leave. What's left is an empty, perhaps even emptier, Tsukuru Tazaki, all alone. Isn't that all there is to it? — Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru couldn't fathom what this substance was. He couldn't accept or reject it. It merely settled on his body as a shadowy swarm, laying an ample amount of shadowy eggs. Then darkness would withdraw and twilight would return, bringing with it the birds, who once again slashed away at his body. — Haruki Murakami

Is it better, financially, to go to the physics department than the philosophy department?" Tsukuru asked. "When it comes to their graduates not earning anything, they're about even. Unless you win the Nobel Prize or something," Haida said, flashing his usual winning smile. — Haruki Murakami

People change,' Sara said.
'True enough,' Tsukuru said. 'People do change. And no matter how close we once were, and how much we opened up to each other, maybe neither of us knew anything substantial about the other. — Haruki Murakami

Like Jonah in the belly of the whale, Tsukuru had fallen into the bowels of death, one untold day after another, lost in a dark, stagnant void. — Haruki Murakami

Beautiful features, always immaculately dressed, the kind of woman that makes a great impression. Their hair is always nicely curled. They major in French literature at expensive private women's colleges, and after graduation find jobs as receptionists or secretaries. They work for a few years, visit Paris for shopping once a year with their girlfriends. They finally catch the eye of a promising young man in the company, or else are formally introduced to one, and quit work to get married. They then devote themselves to getting their children into famous private schools. As he sat there, Tsukuru pondered the kind of lives they led. — Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru decided not to pursue it further. He could think about it all he wanted and never find an answer. He placed this doubt inside a drawer in his mind labeled "Pending" and postponed any further consideration. He had many such drawers inside him, with numerous doubts and questions tucked away. — Haruki Murakami

In Haida's brain there must have been a kind of high-speed circuit built to match the pace of his thoughts, requiring him to occasionally engage his gears, to let his mind race for fixed periods of time. If he didn't - if he kept on running in low gear to keep pace with Tsukuru's reduced speed - Haida's mental infrastructure would overheat and start to malfunction. Or at least, Tsukuru got that impression. — Haruki Murakami

Maybe I am fated to always be alone, Tsukuru found himself thinking. People came to him, but in the end they always left. They came, seeking something, but either they couldn't find it, or were unhappy with what they found (or else they were disappointed or angry), and then they left. One day, without warning, they vanished, with no explanation, no word of farewell. Like a silent hatchet had sliced the ties between them, ties through which warm blood still flowed, along with a quiet pulse. — Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru nodded. "Life's moving along smoothly, then." "I don't know about smoothly, but it's moving along, at least. 'There's no going back now' might be another way of putting it. — Haruki Murakami

Still, sometimes they leave behind a small memento, like Haida and the boxed set of Years of Pilgrimage. He probably didn't simply forget it, but intentionally left it behind in Tsukuru's apartment. And Tsukuru loved that music, for it connected him to Haida, and to Shiro. It was the vein that connected these three scattered people. A fragile, thin vein, but one that still had living, red blood coursing through it. The power of music made it possible. Whenever he listened to that music, particularly "Le mal du pays," vivid memories of the two of them swept over him. At times it even felt like they were right beside him, quietly breathing. — Haruki Murakami

I'm scared, Eri. If I do something wrong, or say something wrong, I'm scared it will wreck everything and our relationship will vanish forever."
Eri slowly shook her head. "It's no different from building stations. If something is important enough, a little mistake isn't going to ruin it all, or make it vanish. It might not be perfect, but the first step is actually building the station. Right? Otherwise trains won't stop there. And you can't meet the person who means so much to you. If you find some defect, you can adjust it later, as needed. First things first. Build the station. A special station just for her. The kind of station where trains want to stop, even if they have no reason to do so. Imagine that kind of station, and give it actual color and shape. Write your name on the foundation with a nail, and breathe life into it. I know you have the power to do that. Don't forget - you're the one who swam across the freezing sea at night. — Haruki Murakami

Sara and the man were swallowed up into the evening crowd. Tsukuru kept looking in the direction they had disappeared in, clinging to the faint hope that Sara would return. That she might notice he was there and come back to explain. But she never came. Other people, with different faces and different looks, passed by, one after another. — Haruki Murakami

Haida got quite talkative when it came to music [ ... ] but Tsukuru barely listened. Instead, a picture of Shiro performing the piece, a mental image, vivid and three-dimensional, welled up in his mind. As if those beautiful moments were steadily swimming back, through a waterway, against the legitimate press of time. — Haruki Murakami

Whenever she was asked to play something, this piece was the one she most often chose. "Le mal du pays." The groundless sadness called forth in a person's heart by a pastoral landscape. Homesickness. Melancholy. As he lightly shut his eyes and gave himself up to the music, Tsukuru felt his chest tighten with a disconsolate, stifling feeling, as if, before he'd realized it, he'd swallowed a hard lump of cloud. — Haruki Murakami

They didn't speak. Words were powerless now. Like a pair of dancers who had stopped mid-step, they simply held each other quietly, giving themselves up to the flow of time. Time that encompassed both past and present, and even a portion of the future. Nothing came between their two bodies, as her warm breath brushed his neck. Tsukuru shut his eyes, letting the music wash over him as he listened to Eri's heartbeat. The beating of her heart kept time with the slap of the little boat against the pier. — Haruki Murakami

Haida stopped and glanced at the clock on the wall. Then he looked at Tsukuru. He was, of course, Haida the son, but Haida the father has been the same age in his story, and so the two of them began to overlap in Tsukuru's mind. It was an odd sensation, as if the two distinct temporalities had blended into one. Maybe it wasn't the father who had experienced this, but the son. Maybe Haida was just relating it as if his father had experienced it, when in reality he was the one who had. Tsukuru couldn't shake this illusion. — Haruki Murakami

Some things in life are just to complicated to explain in any language.'
Olga was absolutely right, Tsukuru thought as he sipped his wine. Not just to explain to others, but to explain to yourself. Force yourself to try to explain it, and you create lies. — Haruki Murakami

The four colorful people - and colorless Tsukuru Tazaki. — Haruki Murakami

Why are we talking about this?" Tsukuru said, half to himself, trying to sound upbeat. "I've never talked to anybody about this before, and never planned to." Sara smiled faintly. "Maybe you needed to talk with somebody. More than you ever imagined. — Haruki Murakami

That's how he became the person known as Tsukuru Tazaki. Before that, he'd been nothing - dark, nameless chaos and nothing more. A less-than-seven-pound pink lump of flesh barely able to breathe in the darkness, or cry out. First he was given a name. Then consciousness and memory developed, and, finally, ego. But everything began with his name. — Haruki Murakami

Something must be fundamentally wrong with me, Tsukuru often thought. Something must be blocking the normal flow of emotions, warping my personality. But Tsukuru couldn't tell whether this blockage came about when he was rejected by his four friends, or whether it was something innate, a structural issue unrelated to the trauma he'd gone through. — Haruki Murakami

A sudden thought struck him - maybe I really did die. When the four of them rejected me, perhaps this young man named Tsukuru Tazaki really did pass away. Only his exterior remained, but just barely, and then over the course of the next half year, even that shell was replaced, as his body and face underwent a drastic change. The feeling of the wind, the sound of rushing water, the sense of sunlight breaking through the clouds, the colors of flowers as the seasons changed - everything around him felt changed, as if they had all been recast. The person here now, the one he saw in the mirror, might at first glance resemble Tsukuru Tazaki, but it wasn't actually him. It was merely a container, was labeled with the same name - but its contents had been replaced. He was called by that name because there was, for the time being, no other name to call him. — Haruki Murakami

And she had a special ability to separate her body and her heart. I will give you one of them, she told Tsukuru. My body or my heart. But you can't have both. You need to choose one or the other, right now. I'll give the other part to someone else, she said. But Tsukuru wanted all of her. He wasn't about to hand over one half to another man. He couldn't stand that. If that's how it is, he wanted to tell her, I don't need either one. But he couldn't say it. — Haruki Murakami

Did all Finns like to make clever witticisms about life? Or was it just this one driver? Tsukuru hoped it was the latter. — Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru nodded. Coming up with witty sayings about life seemed, after all, to be a trait shared by all Finns. The long winters might have something to do with it. — Haruki Murakami

Tsukuru's mind grew still and tranquil. A quiet feeling, like a frozen tree on a windless winter night. But there was little pain mixed in. Over the years Tsukuru had grown used to this mental image, so much so that it no longer brought him any particular pain. — Haruki Murakami

Ideas are like beards. Men don't have them until they grow up. Somebody said that, but I can't remember who."
"Voltaire," the younger man said. He rubbed his chin and smiled, a cheerful,
unaffected smile. "Voltaire might be off the mark, though, when it comes to me. I have hardly any beard at all, but have loved thinking about things since I was a kid."
His face was indeed smooth, with no hint of a beard. His eyebrows were narrow, but thick, his ears nicely formed, like lovely seashells. "I wonder if what Voltaire meant wasn't ideas as much as meditation," Tsukuru said. The man inclined his head a fraction. "Pain is what gives rise to meditation. It has
nothing to do with age, let alone beards. — Haruki Murakami

Maybe you didn't want to get married, or get tied down?'
Tsukuru shook his head. 'No, I don't think that was it. I'm the sort of person who craves stability. — Haruki Murakami

He met the man at the college pool. Like Tsukuru, the man swam by himself early every morning. They began to have a nodding acquaintance, and eventually, they started to talk. — Haruki Murakami

Afterward, Tsukuru Tazaki's life was changed forever, as if a sheer ridge had divided the original vegetation into two distinct biomes. — Haruki Murakami