Product Description

'A story of love in a cool climate, intensely romantic and weepily beautiful-it is startlingly different: a true original' Guardian

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6649 in Books
• Published on: 2000-06-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In South of the Border, West of the Sun the arc of an average man's life from childhood to middle age with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment becomes the kind of exquisite literary conundrum that is Haruki Murakami's trademark. The plot is simple: Hajime meets and falls in love with a girl in elementary school but loses touch with her when his family moves to another town. He drifts through high school, college and his 20s before marrying and settling into a career as a successful bar owner. Then his childhood sweetheart returns weighed down with secrets:

"When I went back into the bar, a glass and ashtray remained where she had been. A couple of lightly crushed cigarette butts were lined up in the ashtray, a faint trace of lipstick on each. I sat down and closed my eyes. Echoes of music faded away, leaving me alone. In that gentle darkness, the rain continued to fall without a sound".

Murakami eschews the fantastic elements that appear in many of his other novels and stories, and readers hoping for a glimpse of the "Sheep Man" will be disappointed. Yet South of the Border, West of the Sun is as rich and mysterious as anything he has written. It is above all a complex, moving and honest meditation on the nature of love distilled into a work with the crystal clarity of a short story. A Nat King Cole song, a figure on a crowded street, a face pressed against a car window, a handful of ashes drifting down a river to the sea are woven together into a story that refuses to arrive at a simple conclusion. The classic love triangle may seem like a hackneyed theme for a writer as talented as Murakami but in his quietly dazzling way he bends us to his own unique geometry. --Simon Leake, Amazon.com

Synopsis
Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch. Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears. She is beautiful, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the present.

About the Author
Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo.

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Customer Reviews

Snow outside, a warm log fire inside
Reading this book is like being on a mysterious, magical and deeply moving journey through your own mind. It drew me in and kept me there right alongside Hajime, the main character from start to finish. Every feeling and emotion is shared equally between the reader, author and Hajime. It was like experiencing my favourite song playing as the backing track to my favourite film based on my favourite book.

Gabriel Vs Rubin- Rubin wins.
This is a quality novella/short story from Murakami. But as an avid fan I was disappointed by the translation. Having read most of Murakami I often feel that Philip Gabriels's translations leave something to be desired or lose the essential message that Murakami tries to put across. If you look at Murakami's best known works- Norwegian Wood, Wind Up Bird, After Dark, these are the bestselling and best loved and it's no coincidence that they are all translated by Jay Rubin. I felt rather distanced from this one and that the meaning needed further interpretation from the reader. The reader is left frustrated by the surrealism of the relationships in South of The Border and overall it feels unfinished. Many things in Murakami are, of course, left unresolved, but somehow a skilled translator is able to suggest an ending to the reader. See Norwegian Wood for an example. Gabriel is unable to do this. There are some great scenes in SOTBWOTS, great atmospherics involving the usual symbols (Coffee, Jazz, cool bars, distant women) but as a whole it is not a good starting point for those reading Murakami for the first time (Try After Dark). I felt, also, that a really good translation could turn this book into something truly great. Unlike manay of Murkami's other works there is a hint of politics in this one- a suggestion of the Author's despair at the greed and state of modern Tokyo- Greed is represented in the form of Yokio's Father- a wealthy industrialist who becomes corrupted. All in all, there is a great novel at the heart of this but it's one to discover when you've already read the really great ones.

A sentimental man's middle-age crisis
South of the Border, West of the Sun is written in the first person [as far as I can tell quite characteristic of Murakami] and is the narrative of a Japanese man's love life. I am not a great fun of autobiographical or psedo-autobiographical writing as I prefer the polyphony of a novel to the sometimes monotonous and narcissistic style of those works.
This is no exception; the main character rambles about: his preferences in women, his sensitivities in love issues, his experiences, his boredom, his feelings. There is little connection or understanding of anything around him or how the other characters in the book feel, it is a one man's story and a particularly emotional, self-absorbed kind of man for that matter.

*** slight plot spoiler following***
I assume it was the purpose of the author to show the fragmented human experience by not allowing us to learn the truth about any other character -we only know what the main character knows and he doesn't know much- but I felt disappointed by the end. The second part of the book continuously promises to give you the story of the Shimamoto but we learn nothing which makes the narrative even more subjective. Is Shimamoto really the interesting, beautiful, tragic woman Hajime fantasizes about or is she merely a construction of his imagination providing the mystery and drama that a narcissist needs to feel life worth living. [I use the word narcissist randomly but as a matter of fact characteristic of the hero which is pointed by Murakami himself through Hajime's wife when she points out that 'you don't ask anything'].

***end spoiler****

It is fairly well written and consistent piece of writing and if you are interested in reading the monologue of a middle-aged man going on and on about his sensitivities it might be time well spent, for my point of view there are enough men in my life going on and on about their feelings as it is, the next book I'll read will either be complex novel with multiple heros or at least it will have a more intriguing main character.