The Review of Contemporary Fiction

South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami
Paul Maliszewski

Haruki Murakami. South of the Border, West of the Sun. Knopf, 1999. 213 pp. $22.00.

Hajime, the middle-aged narrator of Murakami’s new novel, begins his story completely convinced of how average he is. His was, he allows, “a 100 percent average birth.” The town where he grew up was “your typical middle-class suburbia. . . . Some of the houses might have been a bit larger than mine, but you could count on them all having similar entranceways, pine trees in the garden. The works.” Although Murakami’s stories and novels differ in how unhinged and fantastic he allows events to become, they typically begin with similar statements of calm, with two feet set squarely in contemporary normalcy. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle opens with a character watching a pot of spaghetti boil. Out of this emerges more than 600 pages and all manner of odd event and metaphysical speculation. In the new novel, the events may be less odd, but his attention to the mysteries of ordinary lives that has brought Murakami seemingly contradictory comparisons to Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka remains.
After an uneventful adolescence, Hajime marries and opens two jazz clubs in Tokyo. Everything appears 100 percent okay, but Hajime feels as
if something’s missing, a feeling precipitated by the appearance of Shimamoto, a woman he was friends with in grade school. The two meet periodically at one of his bars and talk. But Shimamoto remains a mystery to Hajime, more a vivid mental idea than a person. She comes into his bar, talks, and exits, leaving Hajime alone to wrestle with his feelings of opportunities lost.
Parts of Hajime’s story might read like another mid-life crisis tale, particularly to American readers, but Murakami evades all of the pitfalls of the form, not allowing Hajime to conveniently escape into fantasy or to ignore his wife at home. [Paul Maliszewski]


Interview with Founder Board of Directors Funders Submission Guidelines Dalkey Archive Full Catalog Current and Forthcoming Titles Recent Titles Review of Contemporary Fiction Special Library Offer Special Backlist Sale Stores & Wholesalers Academics Libraries Reviewers Context Casebooks Author Interviews Links Dalkey Archive News Events Newsletter

The Review of Contemporary Fiction South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami Paul Maliszewski Haruki Murakami. South of the Border, West of the Sun. Knopf, 1999. 213 pp. $22.00. Hajime, the middle-aged narrator of Murakami’s new novel, begins his story completely convinced of how average he is. His was, he allows, “a 100 percent average birth.” The town where he grew up was “your typical middle-class suburbia. . . . Some of the houses might have been a bit larger than mine, but you could count on them all having similar entranceways, pine trees in the garden. The works.” Although Murakami’s stories and novels differ in how unhinged and fantastic he allows events to become, they typically begin with similar statements of calm, with two feet set squarely in contemporary normalcy. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle opens with a character watching a pot of spaghetti boil. Out of this emerges more than 600 pages and all manner of odd event and metaphysical speculation. In the new novel, the events may be less odd, but his attention to the mysteries of ordinary lives that has brought Murakami seemingly contradictory comparisons to Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka remains. After an uneventful adolescence, Hajime marries and opens two jazz clubs in Tokyo. Everything appears 100 percent okay, but Hajime feels as if something’s missing, a feeling precipitated by the appearance of Shimamoto, a woman he was friends with in grade school. The two meet periodically at one of his bars and talk. But Shimamoto remains a mystery to Hajime, more a vivid mental idea than a person. She comes into his bar, talks, and exits, leaving Hajime alone to wrestle with his feelings of opportunities lost. Parts of Hajime’s story might read like another mid-life crisis tale, particularly to American readers, but Murakami evades all of the pitfalls of the form, not allowing Hajime to conveniently escape into fantasy or to ignore his wife at home. [Paul Maliszewski]

Search the full text of our books: