Date Finished: September 13th 2018
Despite having two nonfiction books started, my mind seems incapable of processing facts at the moment. Three pages of biology is a slog. I need narratives. Seeing as I’ve read a lot of nonfiction so far this year, I’m probably due for a fiction binge. And it’s not like I’m short on books to choose from. This time I opted for Haruki Murakami’s South of the Border, West of the Sun.
Hajime: an only child growing up in post-war Japan, his only friend: Shimamoto; she too an only child. The two have an unparalleled bond but, over the years, lose contact. Adrift in life for a decade, he finally settles down, has kids with a wife he loves and runs a successful jazz bar – life is good. That is, until Shimamoto returns.
“Here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her? 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.”
This is my second Murakami, after Kafka on the Shore, and I have to say, I was fully prepared to find it average. Kafka on the Shore is considered one of his better novels and yet, for all its imagination, I found it an awfully hollow read. It was pretty, and interesting and perfectly distracting, but I found no depth. Whilst I love ambiguity in stories, it just felt vague. I expected the same of South of the Border, West of the Sun and, whilst that it left me lukewarm for the first two-thirds, the final third brought events together in such a way as to really intrigue me: ambiguity, not vagueness.
Partly, Hajime’s meditations on being an only child resonated with me, and I felt able to relate to the loneliness that permeated his existence. In places, I was reminded of Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending – one of my favourite novels. Similar meditations on how our actions affect others, as well as ourselves; how past feeds into present, and how closed off the self can be from the world pervaded the novel’s third act. It’s a book that can be puzzled over. And whilst, for me, it lacked the mastery of Barnes or Ishiguro, there was enough to make me want to give Murakami a third try. I wasn’t a fan of his magical realism work first time, but I found this more realistic work a lot more compelling.
“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star. It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist any more. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”
As an aside: should anyone be looking for some music to complement their reading of this novel, they could do worse than the work of Ryo Fukui. A couple of years back, YouTube went around promoting his albums, seemingly randomly, despite the fact he was virtually unknown outside of Japan. It fits well: a talented, self-taught jazz pianist, Fukui owned and regularly played in his own jazz bar. He released his debut album Scenery in 1976. Fukui is exactly the sort of musician Hajime would have playing in his bar.
South of the Border, West of the Sun proves that there’s more to Murakami than just people talking to cats and fantastical things happening without rhyme or reason. Now I understand why Murakami can be mentioned in the same breath as literary titans like Atwood or Ishiguro. Knowing that Kafka on the Shore isn’t representative of his output has made me want to delve further into his work, into the existential mysteries of an intriguing author.
7.5/10
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