Memory and Identity in Haruki Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage

Haruki Murakami introduces a wide array of issues and topics in his fiction; his variegated characters typically enact a wide range of human attitudes and behaviours when encountering the problems of modern life. One recurrent theme in Murakami’s novels is memory. The novelist has a unique ability to present his characters “from the inside”, as it were, describing thus the interior mechanisms that make them who they are. His novels present an opportunity to understand the workings of memory and how people are led by its dictates. His characters often find themselves recollecting their past in order to sustain a present existence that is marred by some type of crisis. As they progress in time, protagonists experience a profound sense of disequilibrium that prompts them to return to the past in order to rebalance their self’s sense of value. In this regard, the paper investigates the dynamics of memory as well as its role in the formation of identity in Haruki Murakami’s novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage (2014). For this purpose, the paper draws on different theories of memory and identity in its analysis.