South of the Border, West of the Sun (eBook)

Description

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Following the massive complexity of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle--Haruki Murakami's best-selling, award-winning novel--comes this deceptively simple love story, a contemporary rendering of the romance in which a boy finds and then loses a girl, only to meet her again years later.

Hajime--"Beginning" in Japanese--was an atypical only child growing up in a conventional middle-class suburb. Shimamoto, herself an only child, was cool and self-possessed, precocious in the extreme. After school these childhood sweethearts would listen to records, hold hands, and talk about their future. Then, despite themselves, in the way peculiar to adolescents, they grew apart, seemingly for good.

Now, facing middle age, finally content after years of aimlessness, Hajime is a successful nightclub owner, a husband and father, when he suddenly is reunited with Shimamoto, propelled into the mysteries of her life, and confronted by dark secrets she is loath to reveal. And so, reckless with enchantment and lust, Hajime prepares to risk everything in order to consummate his first love, and to experience a life he's dreamed of but never had a chance to realize.

Bittersweet, passionate, and ultimately redemptive, South of the Border, West of the Sun is an intricate examination of desire, illuminating the persistent power of childhood and memory in matters of the heart.


From the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

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Haruki Murakami lives in Oiso, Japan, just outside of Tokyo.

Praise for South of the Border, West of the Sun…

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“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 madness as to challenge one’s faith in the material world . . . contains passages that are among his finest.” –The New York Observer

“Haruki Murakami applies his patented Japanese magic realism–minimalist, smooth and transcendently odd–to a charming tale of childhood love lost.” –New York