South of the Border, West of the Sun

by Haruki Murakami

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A moving, thoughtful story of long-lost love and second chances

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.

'Casablanca remade Japanese style...It is dream-like writing, laden with scenes which have the radiance of a poem' The Times

• ISBN10: 0099448572
• ISBN13: 9780099448570
• Publish Date: 1 June 2000 (first published 26 January 1999)
• Publish Status: Active
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Vintage
• Format: Paperback (B-Format (198x129 mm))
• Pages: 192
• Language: English

Reviews

[Bianca]

Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything. You’re here. At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys.

What-might-have-beens may be beautiful because they are exactly just that: just what-might-have-beens.

[Jyc]

★★★☆ // sentiment is dangerous. holding on to memories and what-could-have-beens ruin what good you already have. maybe it didn’t work before because no good can come out of it, so why should it work now? hajime should’ve known better.

[mayavswords]

A pretty standard and interesting read though it had it's boring parts. Notwithstanding that fact, it still kept me going, flipping page after page. It's interesting to read into the mind of Hajime yet he has a pretty normal character, in my opinion. Hm...it took me a few moments to really wrap my mind around the ending and I don't know what to really think about it. I think it's really messed up with how Shimamoto went about things, but that's just my opinion. Otherwise it's a good book~ I liked it overall.

[empressbrooke]

Sometimes I love Haruki Murakami. Sometimes he really falls flat for me. Even when I love him, there are parts of his books that make me roll my eyes. This book finally helped me figure out what is so exasperating about Mr. Murakami - he's obsessed with Manic Pixie Dream Girls. The term was coined by a writer for the AV Club to refer to "that bubbly, shallow cinematic creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures."

Murakami uses a mix of MPDGs and what I consider his version of their flip side, Depressed Pixie Dream Girls. They're all eccentric and just too cute and unusual for their own good, and for some reason they all adore the completely dopey, lifeless blank slates that are Murakami's protagonists, but Murakami's depressed versions are melodramatically tragic and suicidal instead of bubbly.

These women can often be spotted by the lack of their own story, and Shimamoto exhibits that perfectly in South of the Border, West of the Sun. She's mysterious, with a secret past and a dead baby and expensive clothes despite never having worked a day in her life. But do we ever discover anything about her? Does she have a story, or is she merely punctuating the main character's life with her presence? The only thing that was really driving me forward through the book was wanting to find out what her deal was, and all we find out is that she might really be a Pixie Dream Girl.

Also, she can put her mouth around the main character's balls while laying her head on his navel, which is proof that either she really is a dream girl or else the translator had a bit of a hiccup here.

Aside from that trope, Murakami pulled out another duo that I hate hate hate with a passion - grown man mooning over his girlfriend from his teen years, and people falling in love despite not knowing each other. These often go hand in hand, as the grown man will be in love with someone who is now also grown when he runs into her again, and yet he only knows who she was when she was 15. I can't stand it in John Cusack movies, and I really couldn't stand it here. The 37-year-old main character has never stopped thinking about the girl he last saw when they were 12, even though he's gotten married and had kids. It's presented as romantic and nostalgic and everything except the creepy immaturity it really is. And he admits to her when they meet as adults that he loves her even though he doesn't know anything about her except what she was like as a 12-year-old. It elicited the same reaction from me that Casablanca did when the main characters swore to never speak of their pasts and yet drooled declarations of love all over each other. If you love someone despite not knowing them, all you're really doing is loving yourself reflected in their eyes. Blech.

Somehow this little 200-page book has elicited a review longer than most 500-page books get out of me, so I'll stop pissing off film lovers now and go wonder if the remaining Murakami books I have yet to read will meander from this MPDG, teenage-days nostalgia, or if they'll at least make it more fun like [b:The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle|11275|The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle|Haruki Murakami|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1166468418s/11275.jpg|2531376] did.