Source of the original image here. 
 No bingo this time. 
 I've had an awfully hard time trying to write a review for this one. When I try to write an honest review, non-professional that I am, I try to write something that's 1) more substantive than what the back blurb would say, and 2) something which would help myself or any other reader distinguish this from anything else the author has written. I don't always meet both of these qualifications, but here I'm just at a total loss. 
 The basic tropes of Murakami are the same as before - but then again, many fiction writers have favorite or recurring images in their works - to take an almost random sample, Borges has his labyrinths, Twain has steamboats, Tolstoy has French, Vollmann has his whores and WW2 references. To continue this extended example, Murakami has his trains, weird sex, and urban ennui. 
 But now we're at the point where I'm having a hard time telling this book apart from the rest of his work. Murakami even stays with the same emotional motifs - the difficulty of growing up, the hard truths about how people change as time passes. There's a touch of magical realism here, but not as much as 1Q84 or the Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. 
 There's also a possibility of whether all these books about ennui have their own 'meta-narrative' - as if writing on ennui necessarily leads to repetition because it's a stunting process in our own emotional growth. It's almost as if boredom and fear of the unknown are easily translated concepts, and thus a more understood part of Murakami's own appeal. 
 Colorless Tsukuru is not a bad book, but one which fades into the rest of Murakami's work. If these toils and troubles ache out for you still strongly, then this book is another worthy place for them. If not, then go elsewhere.