Or is it? It’s left to the reader to judge. He finds that his friends' lives aren’t so golden (the most promising of them now hawks Lexuses and knowingly owns up to it: “I bet I sound like a car salesman?”) his life by comparison isn't so bad. Change its shade, and it can easily melt into various gradations of darkness.” That old saying about not asking questions if you don’t want to know the answers-well, there’s the rub, and there’s Tsukuru’s problem.

Naturally, this being a Murakami story, the possibilities are hallucinogenic, Kafkaesque, and otherwise unsettling and ominous: “Gray is a mixture of white and black. Helpfully, his girlfriend suggests that he make contact with the foursome to find out what he’d done and why he’d deserved their silence. He’s still wounded by the banishment, still mystified at his friends’ behavior. Fast-forward two decades, and Tsukuru, true to both his name and his one great passion in life, designs train stations. Alas for Tsukuru, he “lacked a striking personality, or any qualities that made him stand out”-though, for all that, he’s different. Perhaps, he reckons between thoughts of suicide, it’s because they can pair off more easily without a fifth wheel perhaps it’s because his name means “builder,” while all theirs have to do with colors: red pine, blue sea, white root, black field. For some inexplicable reason, his four best friends, two males, two females, have cut him off without a word. Murakami ( IQ84, 2011, etc.) turns in a trademark story that blends the commonplace with the nightmarish in a Japan full of hollow men.