Still, Hajime finds himself committed to her and willing to give up his family and sacrifice everything to be with her. Hajime falls deeply in love with her, but the enigmatic Shimamoto disappears and reappears in his life without explanation over the coming months. Some two and a half decades have passed since he has seen her, but one day Shimamoto randomly shows up in his jazz bar, a mysterious and now strikingly beautiful woman whose leg has been mended by surgery. Approaching middle age, an affluent family man in a stable but colorless marriage, Hajime finds himself haunted both by the memories of an old girlfriend whom he once hurt very deeply, and by a longing for a close female childhood friend named Shimamoto who dragged one leg due to polio. Like nearly every Murakami male protagonist, Hajime is a passive, introspective fellow who rather than managing his own destiny more or less lets life happen to him. Like the author, Hajime – the central character of South of the Border, West of the Sun – is an only child who grows up to own a jazz bar. This review thus affords a kind of opportunity for me to reflect not only on this novel but also upon Murakami’s overall literary impact. Quite by accident rather than any design on my part, my final notch in the Murakami catalog represents something of the mid-point of the author’s career – South of the Border, West of the Sun appeared first in Japan in 1992 and was later released in English in 2000 six novels were published before it, and six more after it. That rather prolific body of work includes thirteen novels, three short story collections and an oddball kid’s novella. With the completion of South of the Border, West of the Sun, by Haruki Murakami, I have read everything in the fiction realm that Murakami has written that has been translated into English, which is virtually all of it with the exception of a handful of recent short stories.

The wind up bird chronicle synopsis