What is the meaning of south of the border west of the sun? 2021
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What is south of the border west of the sun about?
Is south of the border west of the sun autobiographical?
Haruki Murakami is arguably the most well-known Japanese author in the west. His unique writing style has captured the attention of readers all over the world and one of his most memorable books is South Of The
Border, West Of The Sun.
Focusing on the relationship between two childhood friends who reconnect in their thirties, South Of The Border, West Of The Sun contains all the classic tropes of a Murakami novel. There’s jazz, joy, heartbreak and the indomitable willpower of the human spirit to go after what it yearns for.
A dream-like book with relatable characters
The novel’s protagonist, Hajime, has grown up in
post-WW2 nhật bản and can’t shake the feeling of loneliness that dogs him through his life. An only child, Hajime finds comfort in the friendship he develops with a girl called Shimamoto in his neighbourhood. But when he moves away, they lose touch and from that point on, Hajime constantly searches for a way to fill the void inside himself.
All through his teenage years and twenties, he feels as if he’s unable to find what’s missing. But in his thirties, Hajime is married, has two children,
owns a couple of bars and lives what could be considered a successful life on the surface. But when Shimamoto suddenly comes back into his life, he’s transported to a past full of fond memories.
Murakami weaves beauty and nuance into Hajime and Shimamoto’s relationship. There’s one scene that involves them taking a trip to Ishikawa which is particularly beautiful and heart-breaking, which effectively sums up the nature of their bond. In Shimamoto, Hajime sees the promise of a life that
he’s been waiting for since he was a child. But Shimamoto cloaks herself in a veil of ‘probablys’ and ‘maybes,’ disappearing and reappearing like a ghost.
The language of the book conjures a dream-like feeling that settles on the reader. Whether it’s through examining how Hajime sees himself or the ephemeral quality of Shimamoto’s actions, there’s a sense of being lulled on a gentle current towards an unstoppable ocean.
Hidden truths come to light
One of my favourite aspects of Murakami’s writing is his eloquence in describing feelings like loneliness
and despondency. Hajime sums this up in the following passage:
“I always feel as if I’m struggling to become someone else. As if I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I suppose it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to re-invent myself. By becoming a different me, I could không lấy phí myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself – as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me.
What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I think that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself.”
This dissatisfaction is played against a backdrop of old jazz records, such as Nat King Cole’s ‘Pretend.’ It’s the perfect combination of hypocrisy and self-awareness. The kind of attitude that is so prevalent in the human condition and it’s
unflinchingly real.
South Of The Boarder, West Of The Sun is available to buy now.
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South of the Border, West of the Sun
by
Murakami Haruki
general information | review summaries | our review | links |
about the author
Title:
South of the Border, West of the Sun
Author:
Murakami Haruki
Genre:
Novel
Written:
1998
Length:
213 pages
Original in:
Japanese
Availability:
South of the Border, West of the Sun – US
South of the Border, West of the Sun – UK
South of the Border, West of the Sun – Canada
South of the Border, West of the Sun – India
Au sud de la frontière, à l’ouest du soleil – France
Südlich der Grenze, westlich der Sonne – Deutschland
A sud del confine, a ovest del sole – Italia
Al sur de la frontera, al oeste del Sol – España
Japanese title: 国境の南、太陽の西
Translated by Philip Gabriel
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Our Assessment:
B+ : thoughtful and nostalgic Japanese midlife crisis novel
See
our review for fuller assessment.
Review Summaries
Source
Rating
Date
Reviewer
Boston Globe
A
31/1/1999
Ariel Swartley
Entertainment Weekly
B+
5/3/1999
Margot Mifflin
London Rev. of Books
.
30/9/1999
Lorna Sage
The LA Times
B+
21/2/1999
Janice P. Nimura
New Statesman
A-
15/11/1999
Scott Reyburn
Thành Phố New York
.
1/3/1999
Alexandra Lange
The New Yorker
.
8/3/1999
.
The NY Observer
B+
1/2/1999
Philip Weiss
The NY Times
A-
17/2/1999
Richard Bernstein
The NY Times Book Rev.
A
14/2/1999
Mary Hawthorne
Rev. of Contemp. Fiction
.
Fall/1999
Paul Maliszewski
Salon
C
24/2/1999
Ray Sawhill
TLS
A
23/7/1999
Phil Baker
The Washington Post
C
14/2/1999
Elizabeth Ward
World Lit. Today
B+
Summer/1999
Erik R. Lofgren
Review Consensus:
No consensus. Some love his approach, others think it does not work at all here. Some think the story is touching, others that is just plain sappy.
From the Reviews:
“Murakami’s most domestic and perhaps most deeply moving novel.” – Ariel Swartley, Boston Globe
“Although Murakami’s writing — or
possibly the translation — is a bit stiff in spots, this is an escapist urban drama in which marital fidelity eventually wins out over romantic passion and, magically, doesn’t seem like a compromise in the least.” – Margot Mifflin, Entertainment Weekly
“This is less a story of transcendent passion than a rather bleak look at the fear of disappointment that inhibits most human interaction. Redemption, in Murakami’s hands, is a matter of recognizing the role you
have played in disappointing others, instead of dwelling on the injustice of your own disappointment. Murakami’s matter-of-fact narrator delivers chilling insights on modern mores. Fans of his more elaborate efforts, though, may hope this brief sketch is just an interlude between acts.” – Janice P. Nimura, The LA Times
“Background exposition and description are pared down and characters are animated in a single image. (…) Murakami writes with authority about
what, for other less gifted novelists, is the crushing ordinariness of late-20th-century life.” – Scott Reyburn, New Statesman
“(A) charming tale of childhood love lost. (…) As in much of Murakami’s work, the mystical denouement leaves you with more mood than satisfaction — the perfect mood, in fact, for listening to Hajime’s favorite tuy nhiên, Duke Ellington’s “Star-Crossed Lovers”.” – Alexandra Lange, Thành Phố New York
“At its best, 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. (…) But I can’t say this book wholly succeeds.” – Philip Weiss, The Thành Phố New York Observer
“Mr. Murakami’s narrative style is as spare and unadorned as a traditional Japanese room, so seemingly empty that it needs to be furnished with the mind.” – Richard Bernstein, The Thành Phố New York Times
“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, Review of Contemporary Fiction
“Zingless.” – Ray Sawhill, Salon
“South of the Border, West of the Sun constantly risks sentimentality, kitsch and excess. If it
triumphantly survives them, it is perhaps because those things are innately part of relationships, and also because its aestheticization and stylization of emotion are akin to what Noel Coward famously described as the strange potency of cheap music. (…) South of the Border, West of the Sun is impressively written and structured, with a deft use of repeated motifs.” – Phil Baker, Times Literary Supplement
“(S)urface is all, and it’s not nearly enough.
Obsession, nostalgia, passion, possession: All the dark forces of the mind are here, right enough, but they have about as much substance as the cheap perfumes suggested by that tawdry row of nouns.” – Elizabeth Ward, The Washington Post
“South of the Border, West of the Sun is different from what we have come to expect of Murakami: less surreal and complex, more introspective, less comic, and closer to our lives, perhaps. Some, bothered by the thinness of
the plot, will undoubtedly claim that this is not vintage Murakami. That notwithstanding, the novel is an enjoyable, provocative read.” – Erik R. Lofgren, World Literature Today
Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review‘s biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the
reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.
– Return to
top of the page –
The complete review‘s Review:
South of the Border, West of the Sun is an odd echo of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood (see our
review), written five years earlier. In both the narrator is 37 (though in Norwegian Wood the focus is on the narrator’s university years, while in South of the Border the crisis is in the present). In both music serves as a significant backdrop — most notably, among the many tunes, the Beatles’ “Norwegian Wood” in the eponymous novel, and Nat King Cole’s “South of the Border” and
“Star-Crossed Lovers” in the other. Women disappear from each narrator’s life, and much is left unspoken and unexplained. And there are strong autobiographical elements in both — like the narrator of this novel Murakami also ran a jazz bar, for example. South of the Border is a novel about a midlife crisis. Hajime, the narrator is a single child, born in 1951 when there were few single children in nhật bản. He has a close childhood friend,
Shimamoto, a girl with a partially lame leg who is also a single child. Young love does not quite blossom and they grow apart once they begin attending different junior high schools, but the connection between the two was obviously a strong one. She remains on his mind long after. In high school Hajime has a girlfriend, Izumi; he hurts her deeply by having a wild, purely sexual affair with her cousin. He goes to college, gets a boring job, and
finally gets married when he is thirty, to Yukiko. Her father offers him the chance to open his own business, and he takes it, opening first one and then a second jazz bar. It turns out that this something that he is good at, and that satisfies him. Hajime and his wife have two daughters, and lead a fairly happy existence. But Hajime isn’t completely satisfied. For one his father-in-law has vaguely drawn him into shady businesses and then insider
trading. And then there is the lingering memory of Shimamoto. Hajime never really got her out of his mind, and he still turns (and occasionally runs after) every lame woman he encounters. Once he thought he saw her in the street and followed her, leading to a bizarre confrontation — an sự kiện that is never completely understood by him. A magazine article about the successful jazz-bar owner leads a
number of his old friends to get in touch with him again. One tells him about seeing Izumi, whose life has clearly not gone very well. And then, suddenly, Shimamoto appears in his bar. Even then her presence is vague and unclear. She reveals little about her current situation, or what has happened to her since her youth. She fades from sight again, and reappears. Hajime is still drawn to her, and twice he goes on trips with her, putting his marriage
in jeopardy. He is willing to give it all up for Shimamoto, but she has other sacrifices in mind. Love is lost, time can not be regained. The past is done with, even if it haunts us. Eventually the midlife crisis is resolved: Hajime knows what he has to do. When he was young the mysterious promise of what is “South of the Border” fascinated him. Eventually he learnt it meant nothing more than Mexico.
“West of the Sun” is more elusive — Shimamoto gives the example of hysteria siberiana, an illness affecting Siberian farmers overwhelmed by the distance in and the plains of Siberia, heading off “like someone possessed” for a land west of the sun. Hajime conquers the urge and the illusion, staying in place. A melancholy, subtle, simple and elusive story, South of the Border is not entirely successful. There is, perhaps, too little to
it. The story moves forward rapidly, with only a few significant encounters and events. Murakami could have fleshed it out more. Nevertheless, it is a good, quick, and ultimately haunting read.
– Return to top of the page –
Links:
South of the Border, West of the Sun:
Vintage publicity page
Vintage (UK) publicity page
Belfond publicity page
DuMont publicity page
Einaudi publicity page
Tusquets publicity page
Reviews:
After Ride
Steven E. Alford Book Review
another cookie crumbles
Austin Chronicle (scroll down for review)
Buchkritik.at (German)
Chazz W
Entertainment Weekly
A Fiction Habit
Good Reports.net
Ian Hocking
JoV’s Book Pyramid
Kirkus Reviews
literaturkritik.de (German)
Colin Marshall
Mindjack
New Statesman
Thành Phố New York
The Thành Phố New York Observer
The Thành Phố New York Times
The Thành Phố New York Times Book Review
Publishers Weekly
qualityarcade
Reading Monk
Salon
Sam Still Reading
Tolstoy is my Cat
Werewolves on the Moon
Word Search
Worldly Obsessions
writer on writer action
Danny Yee’s Book Reviews
Murakami Haruki:
See the complete review‘s Murakami Haruki page
Haruki Murakami site
Haruki Murakami – US site
Official UK site
Other books by Murakami Haruki under review:
1Q84
After Dark
After the Quake
Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman
Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage
First Person Singular
Hear the Wind Sing
Kafka on the Shore
Killing Commendatore
Men Without Women
Norwegian Wood
Pinball, 1973
Sputnik Sweetheart
The Strange Library
Underground
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running
Wind/Pinball: see Hear the Wind Sing and
Pinball, 1973
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Books about Murakami Haruki under review:
A Wild Haruki Chase: Reading Murakami Around the World
David Karashima explains
Who We’re Reading When We’re Reading Murakami
Jay Rubin’s Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words
Other books of interest under review:
See Index of Japanese literature at the complete review
David Mitchell’s Murakamiesque Ghostwritten
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About the Author:
Japanese
author Murakami Haruki (村上春樹) was born January 12, 1949. He attended Waseda University. He has written several internationally acclaimed bestsellers and is among the best-known contemporary Japanese writers.
– Return to top of the page –
What is south of the border west of the sun about?
The novel tells the story of Hajime, from his childhood in a small town in nhật bản to his adult years in Tokyo. He meets Shimamoto, a girl with polio and a fellow only child. They spend their time together talking about their interests in life and listening to records on Shimamoto’s stereo.
Is south of the border west of the sun autobiographical?
Hajime’s personal story, elements of which are apparently autobiographical, is a moving tale of teenage romance and angst and of mid-life crisis and nostalgia.
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