Tormented Teens, Head Demons & Wooden Willies!

What a veritable box of delights the bank holiday weekend has delivered to me. I’ve read about a man tormented by his friends abandonment of him; watched a play where the relatively only sane person gets shot and presumably dies; and watched grown men beat each other with their bras or whacking wooden willies. Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years Of Pilgrimage – by Haruki Murakami is possibly one of his more believable novels. Murakami writes about nightmarish situations which are relatable but usually too surreal to be taken seriously. In this novel though, whilst there is a small amount of the surreal, the power of dreams is considered by many to be our unconscious state talking to us, and so there is the element of suspended disbelief when reading the book. Tsukuri’s four best friends at school all have names which mean colours, red, blue, white and black. Tsukuru is the only one whose name is colourless and this upsets him, he thinks he is the boring one of the group,