A Pilgrimage to the End of the Rainbow: Haruki Murakami, Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2013)

The present study aims to decipher the “plural” reading suggested by the novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, published by Haruki Murakami in 2013, by identifying a narrative composition structured around binary conceptual pairs: colour-colourless, colour-noncolour, one-multiple, freedom-threat. It examines, from a semiotic-cultural and poetic-hermeneutic perspective, the dialectics of paired key concepts that shape the “becoming” of a “colourless” protagonist. The argument also presents the discursive-narrative strategy through which the Japanese writer synthesises various existing studies in the field into his own theory of colours, thus transforming the novel’s space into a graphic-pictorial composition that draws on the properties of light and colour as physical-chemical and philosophical-cultural phenomena, with an emphasis on the subjective dimension and the emotional effects of chromatic imagery.

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