South of the Border, West of the Sun by Huruki Murakami

For the Love & Books series on Stacked, Christina isn’t the only one with that lovin’ feeling (after all, I’m getting married in five days!). So to kick off this week of reading about love, I’d like to present an underrated book by one of my favorite authors, Haruki Murakami – South of the Border, West of the Sun.

The basic plot: Hajime was a young boy when he met Shimamoto, a girl with a limp who became his best friend. After years of sharing each other’s deepest secrets, they’re separated by going to different high schools, and before you know it Hajime is married with two kids and he owns a successful chain of jazz bars. It’s been 25 years since they last saw each other when Shimamoto walks into one of his bars, and her entrance in his life leads to a whole host of “what-ifs” that plague Hajime and threaten his marriage and his financial success (his wife’s father is the primary investor in his bars).

What I find fascinating about this book is the way Murakami makes Shimamoto a ghost from the past, even when she’s standing right in front of Hajime. She doesn’t talk about where she’s been or what she’s been up to. She wears expensive clothes and disappears for weeks on end, appearing at erratic intervals with no rhyme or reason. She pleads to Hajime to never think about where she might be going or what she has to do when she’s not with him. It’s the kind of surreal conceit that Murakami does so well, blending the detail-oriented Western world with the mystical promise of the ghosts of Japan. It’s no coincidence that Hajime’s success in his work and life is primarily a Western one – he runs two clubs that feature American jazz music, he lives a financially comfortable lifestyle more in line with what Westerners consider successful (lots of money, a nice wife, two kids, franchising opportunities, all his affairs in order). Shimamoto offers him not only a sense of nostalgia combined with newness, but also an escape from the ontological cage that Hajime’s lifestyle has built around him.

But that newness is unattainable. In the same way that Hajime is unable to know the details and particulars of Shimamoto’s life, he is also unable to fully connect with her. Their fates were sealed when they parted ways in high school. Now there’s too much baggage, too much that is unknowable, and too much time has passed for them to go back and make different choices about their lives. The connection that Hajime might have had with Shimamoto is close and palpable but ultimately unknowable. Murakami’s surreal dismissal of Shimamoto’s details is his way of making this point clear with subtlety and grace and he succeeds magnificently.

There is one other subplot that’s worth talking about. Between his friendship with Shimamoto and marrying his wife, Hajime had a girlfriend in college named Izumi, whom he hurt very badly by having a crazy affair with her hyper-sexual cousin. This act of betrayal frames the main story and outlines the very real consequences of what going back on the choices you make really means. Throughout the novel we hear about Izumi’s life through secondhand sources, friends of friends, until Murakami pays off this part of the story in a final arresting image that connects the unknowability of what might have been with the cosmic wounds that linger when you try to make those phantom connections real.

Like After Dark, this is another novel that Murakami fans don’t pay much attention to, which is a shame because it’s one of his most emotionally passionate books. Lesser authors have made affairs a type of wish fulfillment where sexy and alluring partners can help us break out of our emotionally dry and boring lives. Murakami avoids this by never flinching from the consequences of Hajime’s attempts to know the unknowable. Even though Hajime couldn’t have known that Shimamoto would come back and talk to him again, never once does Murakami excuse him from his commitment not only to his wife and kids but to the fabric of the universe that tells us that we go through this life once and we have to accept the consequences of our actions. Hajime’s attempts to connect with Shimamoto (and his decision to cheat on Izumi) are attempts to break that fabric and undo the turns of his life, and that has cosmic consequences all the way to the final heartbreaking line of this wonderful novel.

Like I said earlier in the post, I’m getting married in five days to a woman whom I love very much. Planning this wedding, preparing myself for the commitment I’m about to make, it’s made me reflective about the choices I’ve made that have brought me here. I imagine if I had made different choices I wouldn’t be marrying this amazing woman. There are a million different Marcelos that could be existing right now but those variations are truly unknowable, and trying to know them is futile and dangerous. South of the Border, West of the Sun is a book that understands that concept inherently. It’s a wise and thoughtful book about love’s double-edged sword.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Tagged as: love, Love & Books, recommended reading