South of the Border, West of the Sun » (~)

Writing in a style that is deceptively plainspoken, Haruki Murakami finds a dreamlike common ground between Japan and the West, conscious and subconscious. His heroes lose themselves in quests that we may not always understand, but are hopelessly compelled to follow.

In South of the Border, West of the Sun, the simple arc of a man's life—with its attendant rhythms of success and disappointment—becomes the exquisite literary terrain of Haruki Murakami's most haunting work.

Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb, Hajime—beginning in Japanese—has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime's happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl named Shimamoto clouds his heart.

When Shimamoto shows up one rainy night, now a breathtaking beauty with a secret from which she is unable to escape, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime's quotidian existence begin to give way. And the details of stolen moments past and present—a Nat King Cole melody, a face pressed against a window, a handful of ashes drifting downriver to the sea—threaten to undo him completely. Rich, mysterious, quietly dazzling, South of the Border, West of the Sun is Haruki Murakami's wisest and most compelling fiction.

Ray Sawhill

Haruki Murakami's new novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, has little of the deadpan daring of his 1989 A Wild Sheep Chase, or of such later works as Dance Dance Dance (1994) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997). South of the Border is narrated by a successful though vaguely unhappy jazz bar owner named Hajime. Once, as a child, he'd had a perfect friendship, with a crippled girl named Shimamoto. But he moved away, and he has gone on to break some hearts, marry, prosper and lose his ideals. Then, as in a scene from a movie (Murakami leans heavily on Casablanca throughout), Shimamoto walks into one of Hajime's clubs, flourishes a cigarette and asks for a light. Hajime starts to feel whole again -- yet not quite. The passing of time and the shame of betrayal keep getting in the way. And anyway, is this new, grown-up Shimamoto real or a phantom summoned up by need and imagination? It's Brief Encounter for the New Age.

American writing schools may overdo the injunction always to show and never to tell -- our young writers seem to know how to do little but show us things -- but it's advice that Murakami could have used. An amazing amount of this book is devoted to Hajime's discussions of what Shimamoto means to him, what his wife means to him, what his predicament means to him. It's possible that Murakami is playing changes on a Japanese genre I'm unfamiliar with, or that he's needling Hajime's narcissism in ways too Japanese for me to perceive. And he does have a wonderful way of making the novel's action seem to play out against a background of serenely classical Japanese art. But he also seems determined to baby his imagination. For example, Hajime tells us of his delight in his rapport with Shimamoto. Yet here's a typical exchange:

"You mean we're lovers?"

"You think we're not?"

I catch the echoes of '40s weepies. It's what those echoes ought to be bouncing off that's missing.

If you're unfamiliar with Murakami's work and want to give it a try, start with A Wild Sheep Chase. A melancholy yet irreverent phantasmagoria about an ad guy, a girl with beautiful ears, a mysterious sheep and Japanese guilt over World War II, it suggests a 21st century cross between Absalom, Absalom! and Mothra, and it's still fresh and moving. My guess is that in this zingless new novel, the writer thinks he's using Hajime's tale to wrestle with what Thomas McGuane once called "the sadness-with-no-name," a forlornness many baby boomers fall prey to and can't shake off.

But his approach -- hunting endlessly for the emotion's metaphysical and historical meanings -- pays off only in Rolling Stone magazine-style banalities. Recalling the end of his '60s college days, Hajime tells us, "Like a drooping flag on a windless day, the gigantic shock waves that had convulsed society for a time were swallowed up by a colorless, mundane workaday world." While the significance of it all piles up and the action drifts, the annoyed reader may start to wonder: Does Murakami really think that no one before his generation ever got scared of middle age, asked what life is all about and did a little screwing around in search of an answer? -- Salon