South of the Border, West of the Sun

Something enters your life.  And for the very brief moments you shared, you were drawn nearer to them and yet, you never received near than enough to completely know them.  Or to be taken by them.  You decide to take each moment as it comes until you reach the inevitable end as you notice things drawing to a close.  Most of the time, everything is almost predictable; you are never blown away or shocked by the unravelling of events.  The time has come and it is nearly over.  And you don’t even see it coming but they draw you so close, so intimately, that you’re holding your breath because you’re in that deep.  You feel that all things are about to explode and implode heavily upon your life, or moment.  Then they release you.  Suddenly.  Your mind and body remains shaken, as you try to make sense of it.  As you try to weave together some sense.  Attempting to tie together the bundles of loose ends but your hands are shaking too much for any coherence to develop.  You realise throughout that you’ve been given the bare minimum of details only so that they could pull you hither, but you knew nothing at all, really.  In hindsight, you realise now – it was just one chapter of enticement after the other.  That most of it was fabricated.  Delusions.  And you were unknowingly invited to travel along.  Journeying in the mind of an unstable person, someone who grew unsettled by an obsession that, if thought about rationally, never derived from romantic love.  A concert of jazz and classical tunes to fool all the more, kept being played, over and over. And now that it is all over, you’re yearning for so much more.

That’s exactly how I felt when I had finished reading South of the Border, West of the Sun (1992; 1998) by Haruki Murakami.  This passage sums up for me everything I feel Murakami was getting at and hoping to achieve from the reader:

 ‘Inside that darkness, I saw rain falling on the sea.  Rain softly falling on a vast sea, with no one there to see it.  The rain strikes the surface of the sea, yet even the fish don’t know it is raining’ (p. 213).

The novel reads average throughout, until the very last few pages when the events that had happened begin to make sense, or you realise how they don’t make any sense.  When you’re drawn into the protagonist's final thoughts, and you’re slowly developing a sense of how his mind works, his untied thoughts.  You read the final sentence and it hits that all along you’ve missed out on the clues that came clothed in the writer’s manner of foreshadowing tales that never reached closure; you don't catch on until the very end that the writer made nothing of them.  The loose ends.  The untied beginnings.  This could very well have been Murakami’s precise intention.

This was my first Murakami read (thank you to Taahir, who was kind enough to lend me his copy - it's his favourite Murakami read, by the way).  I am quite eager to measure this novel to his other works.  Riding on the feeling that swept across my literary heart as I traced the ending lines, a fan could have been born.


Read this interview by the Paris Review with Haruki Murakami, The Art of Fiction No. 182, conducted by John Wray about his fiction and self, about the characters he writes and their positioning.  It's all very telling.  I read it after reading this novel and it is rather revealing, adds an appreciation of sorts for some of the things I happened to overlook.  There's no mention of the novel I reflected on, though, but you get a pretty good idea of Murakami's literary work and style of writing.  What is striking from this interview are the similarities in characteristics between the writer and his protagonist in South of the Border, West of the Sun.  Enjoy!