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  • I sat down in Border's one afternoon and pulled this book from the shelves. After a few pages, I decided that I'd get it.

    I just can't resist a story like the opening of this book. Back in the old days, you were still young, life was simple, and you had a childhood sweetheart. There was som ... Continue

    I sat down in Border's one afternoon and pulled this book from the shelves. After a few pages, I decided that I'd get it.

    I just can't resist a story like the opening of this book. Back in the old days, you were still young, life was simple, and you had a childhood sweetheart. There was something between you, yet there was nothing. To me, there is a magical charm in it.

    Of course the story then fast-forwards and changes completely. It remains a good novel, but personally I can't help feeling I am tricked into buying the book by the opening chapter...

    

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• ― pthow said on Apr 8, 2007 about the Paperback edition| Add your feedback

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.

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