Title: South of the Border, West of the Sun
Author: Haruki Murakami, trans. Philip Gabriel (2003)
Publisher: Vintage Random House
It is not often that you come across a book as powerful, seductive, and unsettling as South of the Border, West of the Sun. The novel follows an only child, Hajime, through adolescence and into adulthood, and chronicals his romantic, sometimes alien, relationships with women, each of which is haunted by the memory of his childhood friend, a girl called Shimamoto. With Shimamoto’s reappearance 25 years after they parted ways, Hajime’s (already dubious) grip on reality falters, and he is forced to confront his past, his past self, and all that he has lived to outrun.
In many ways, the trajectory of South of the Border begins like a kitset romance, with uncertain feelings for a girl that slowly begin to develop: from hand holding, kissing, hugging, touching, and eventually to sex. However, while this typical pattern begins with Shimamoto, its flow is disrupted by Hajime’s moving house, and his attentions are redirected elsewhere: from Shimamoto to Izumi, and then on through to handfuls of other women as he lives through his 20’s. This interruption of the usual romance plotline, and the displacement of Hajime’s sexual awakening across many girls and relationships, shapes the drama of the rest of the book.
The fundamental attraction of South of the Border is, for me, its incongruity, and the way in which a reader is led into Hajime’s head, where real and imaginary interactions blend. Often both possibilities – real or imaginary – coexist, and it is hard to say which is more troubling; for example, Hajime’s fear (p.21) that “The last thing [Izumi]’d said was how happy she was, but in the cold light of dawn it seemed more like an illusion I’d dreamed up”, or his confession (p.36) that “For me the boundary dividing the real world and the world of dreams has always been vague”. This incongruity is taken to the extreme in Chapter 6, and is perhaps the single most important reason that you should read this book. It is this episode that without fail haunts me every time I think about Hajime and/or Shimamoto. It seems in many ways to be at once the key to unlock, and the bolt that keeps shut, the secrets of the novel, and on a literal and a figurative level Hajime’s actions in this chapter take on a momentary clarity.
A work of literature, they say, is effective not because of the message it presents, but because of the questions that it asks. In South of the Border, West of the Sun, Murakami seems to ask whether it is possible to change who we are, who we have been since childhood, or who our lives and experiences have shaped us to be. Read this novel, I suggest, and then ask yourself the same thing.
SETH ALEXANDROS 