The Color That Lingers After Almost Transparent Blue

The Korean edition I read carried an adults-only label. I already knew its title, Almost Transparent Blue, even though I had little idea what I would find inside it.

I borrowed it near the end of university. Graduation was approaching and I wanted to read as much as I could while I still had a little time. A title I recognized was enough to get me to take it home.

What I found inside the cover

I liked the title much more readily than I liked reading the book. The novel repeatedly puts its characters in situations I found uncomfortable or shocking.

Drug use, sex and violence fill much of it. I finished it partly because I felt I owed the book the attention I had signed up for when I borrowed it.

I came to see those scenes as Murakami’s way of writing about disorientation in 1970s Japan. His characters live near an American military base and seem to have very little sense of where their lives are going. The book gives that loss a form readers can argue about.

The material can do serious work in a novel. I still found it difficult to spend time with. What I most wanted to think about afterward was the title.

What color is almost transparent blue?

An almost transparent blue makes me think of clear water. It is the color I would expect to find in a scene of calm.

In Murakami’s closing pages, the color belongs to a shard of glass at dawn. The scene is disturbing, and the image held my attention for a very different reason than the blue I had first imagined.

• The narrator notices curves in the landscape and links them to earlier images: a horizon blurred by waves, a woman’s arm and the light at an airfield.
• Dawn makes a bloodstained edge of glass look almost clear.
• The shade gives the novel its name.

I kept coming back to the contrast between the red I expected and the blue the narrator sees. The book makes a color carry an experience I would usually describe in very different terms.

I never came around to enjoying the story. It did make me think about what it feels like to lose direction, and how an image can stay clear when the person looking at it cannot see far ahead.

The novel that introduced Ryū Murakami

Born in 1952, Ryū Murakami made his literary debut with the novel in 1976. It won the Gunzō Prize for New Writers and the Akutagawa Prize that year.

The book has appeared in several Korean editions and remains one of his best-known works. Nancy Andrew’s English translation was published as Almost Transparent Blue.

I came away with reservations about the experience of reading it and respect for what Murakami could do with a sentence. A book can leave those two feelings side by side.

Book details

Almost Transparent Blue

Author

Ryū Murakami

Korean edition published

August 22, 2014

ISBN-13

9788993690286

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