The Edge Online: Books. Haruki Murakami -- South of the Border, West of the Sun

South of the Border, West of the Sun
Haruki Murakami
Knopf hardback, 213 pages
Published April 1999
ISBN 0375402519
Review by Gerald Houghton (1999)

Hajime – Japanese for ‘Beginning’ – is not lucky in love. As a child in post-war Japan he had a friend, a special friend called Shimamoto, left lame by childhood illness. And because of her leg, because she was unable to walk any great distance, they would sit in her parents' house and hold hands and listen to records. He was an only child. She was an only child. ‘The phrase only child stood there, pointing an accusatory finger at me.’

And then Shimamoto’s family moved and the pair, as so often happens, simply lost touch. They were friends – never any more than friends – but the bond was broken. And then Hajime met Izumi and she became his girlfriend, but would never, despite his protestations, sleep with him. Eventually he went away to college and another tie in his short life was severed. His twenties were desultory, life something that happened to him, was never propelled by him. ‘Something had to give: I couldn't keep on living like this.’

South Of The Border, West Of The Sun is a tiny splinter of a novel after last year’s shelf-warping The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. It is, however, whatever its size – the apparent wisp of its construction – perfectly imagined. It’s a novel about longing, about small pains and aching regrets: ‘But I didn't understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.’ It is, in point of fact, a very subtle ghost story, about being haunted by your own past. It carries the very real sense of always being about things that are just out of its reach, explanations that are never given.

Very like, in fact, the strange and wonderful world of Jonathan Carroll. Anyone familiar with the exemplary magic realist will find this book alive with themes and riffs, of unexplained connections and casual magic. There has long been a certain kinship between the two (Carroll is a confessed fan), but this is the book that makes the bond explicit. And, given the inherent otherness of much of Murakami’s work – the hotel in Dance, Dance, Dance, the well-dwelling of Wind-Up Bird – South of the Border, this small, exquisitely realised disturbed romance, is perhaps also the book that Western audiences will find easiest on the palate. His time here might finally have arrived.