Description
In post-war Japan, a middle-aged family man and owner of two jazz clubs is dogged by a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success and a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl. When the beautiful Shimamoto shows up one rainy night, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime's quotidian existence begin to give way.
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.
Review:
A wise and beautiful book. - The New York Times Book Review
A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other. - The New York Times
Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami's deeply original fiction. - The Baltimore Sun
Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance. - San Francisco Chronicle
His most deeply moving novel. - The Boston Globe
Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale. - The Baltimore Sun
A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us. - The Philadelphia Inquirer
Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic. - San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
Haunting and natural. . . . South of the Border, West of the Sun so smoothly shifts the reader from mundane concerns into latent madnes
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