South of the Border, West of the Sun
South of the Border, West of the Sun is one of Murakami's most intimate and restrained novels, a story about first love, longing, and the seductive pull of the road not taken. Hajime grows up an only child in postwar Japan, closest in the world to Shimamoto, a girl left with a limp by childhood polio, with whom he spends slow afternoons listening to records. Adolescence pulls them apart.
Decades later Hajime has built a good life: a devoted wife, two daughters, and a pair of stylish Tokyo jazz bars. Then Shimamoto walks back into it, beautiful and unreadable, offering nothing about the years between and everything of the feeling he thought he had outgrown. As she appears and vanishes without explanation, Hajime is forced to weigh the family he has made against the ache of a past that never quite let him go.
Quiet, sensual, and shadowed by a faint uncanny, this is Murakami at his most emotionally direct, less concerned with the surreal machinery of his larger novels than with the ordinary, ruinous power of desire and memory. It asks what we owe the people we love, and what we are willing to risk for the ghost of something we lost.
An only child turned successful Tokyo jazz-bar owner whose settled life is upended by the return of his first love.
Hajime's childhood soulmate, left with a limp by polio, who reappears decades later beautiful, elusive, and withholding her history.
Hajime's warm, devoted wife and the mother of his two daughters, whose love steadies the life he is tempted to abandon.