Ep 085 - Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, by Haruki Murakami

Overdue

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Craig Getting, Arts, Books, Podcasts, Literature, Comedy, Andrew Cunningham

4.6 • 2.3K Ratings

🗓️ 4 November 2014

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Haruki Murakami is a giant of contemporary literature, particularly in his native Japan. However, his books are often rife with references to Western culture - in fact, one of his breakout novels was named after the Beatles song Norwegian Wood. His first-person style marries the fantastic with the private, the epic with the intimate, and his latest novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki... is no exception.

At least that's what our friend Chris says. Andrew's out this week, so we invited Chris on the show, and he brought with him Murakami's most recent novel. We don't normally cover books this new, but Murakami's been on our list for a while so we decided to tackle it anyway. Little did we know that asking Chris to talk about Murakami meant learning a lot more about the Wu-Tang Clan than we ever expected on Overdue.

Caveat Lictor: Chris reveals a substantial spoiler around the 37 minute mark. Nothing you won't discover a third of the way through the novel, but we thought you might want to know.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	While Andrew and Craig believe the joy of discovery is crucial to enjoying any well-told tale,
0:05.1	they will not shy away from spoiling specific story beats when necessary.
0:10.4	Plus, these are books you should have read by now.
0:30.0	Now the way welcome to Overdo, this is a podcast about the books that you've been
0:39.2	meaning to read. My name is Craig. And I'm Chris, filling it for Andrew.
0:43.1	Hey Chris, how's it going? It's going pretty well. Welcome to the show.
0:48.9	I'm excited to be here, even though I'm sad that Andrew's not here.
0:52.4	I'm a little sad that he's not here, but we shouldn't be too sad because he just spent a week
0:58.2	in St. Thomas. I'm sure he was reading books the entire time. I hear tell that he was reading books
1:07.7	of good portion of the time. But I also hear that he was like eating mahi mahi and getting drunk on
1:15.6	the beach, though. Like chasing chickens or something? I'm pretty sure there was live chickens
1:22.5	that were running around there. I know he touched a turtle in the ocean. He told me this today.
1:31.2	I don't think he was supposed to, but I was going to say on purpose. So he just swim by it.
1:37.4	Yeah, I think they were swimming and a turtle showed up. So of course, if you encounter a wild animal,
1:43.7	you touch it. Stay tuned till next week when we find out Andrew's side of the story.
1:52.0	And then the week after, we'll get the turtle on the call. That'll be fun.
1:57.2	So yeah, we've been talking about this for a couple of weeks. Andrew got married and so he went away
2:00.9	and Chris was kind enough to volunteer to fill in. And he also suggested a Murk Hommie book,
2:09.1	which is something we haven't covered on the show. We'll get more into that a little bit later.
2:15.1	But Chris, what kind of books do you like? Like I feel like we're nearing a hundred episodes of
2:22.4	this show. People have a sense of just where Andrew and I are coming from and our general ignorance
2:27.7	to books. I think like before this show started, I would have picked you to host a book show before me.
	...

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