South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami
South of the Border, West of the Sun, Haruki Murakami
4 Rating(s)
List: $17.50 | Sale: $12.25
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South of the Border, West of the Sun

Author: Haruki Murakami, Philip Gabriel

Narrator: Eric Loren

Unabridged: 6 hr 33 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 10/08/2013

Synopsis

South of the Border, West of the Sun is the beguiling story of a past rekindled, and one of Haruki Murakami’s most touching novels.

Hajime has arrived at middle age with a loving family and an enviable career, yet he feels incomplete. When a childhood friend, now a beautiful woman, shows up with a secret from which she is unable to escape, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime’s quotidian existence begin to give way. Rich, mysterious, and quietly dazzling, in South of the Border, West of the Sun the simple arc of one man’s life becomes the exquisite literary terrain of Murakami’s remarkable genius.

About The Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than forty languages, and the most recent of his many international honors is the Jerusalem Prize, whose previous recipients include J. M. Coetzee, Milan Kundera, and V. S. Naipaul.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Ian on October 11, 2011

A Companion Intervenes I re-read “South of the Border” immediately after re-reading “Norwegian Wood”, as part of my training regime for Murakami’s “1Q84”. Although they were written five years apart and were separated by “Dance Dance Dance”, they are good companion pieces. They stand out from Murakami......more

Goodreads review by Kelly on March 19, 2008

Whatever Murakami book I am reading, I find myself stepping back into the same world as before, with all of the same characters and themes of wells and transience and strangely poignant details like gold lighters and classical music records and the myriad spaghetti dinners--the mundane details of ev......more

Goodreads review by emma on January 03, 2025

pretty sure this was on my to-read list because someone said it's the best murakami. but that must've been a cruel prank. reading murakami books is always a balancing act between how weird and cool his brain is and how much he hates women.  i will let you guess where this one, which is not magical and......more

Goodreads review by Martine on April 26, 2009

I never fail to be impressed by the way Murakami captures mood and feelings. Even in his less fantastic novels, of which this is one, he draws you into a world that is all his, and so full of possibilities and connections that you feel you could grasp them if you reached out. Except you don't, becau......more

Goodreads review by Jim on March 26, 2023

[Revised 3/26/23] This novel starts out as a coming-of-age story of a young Japanese man. Like other Murakami novels we have cats, Western culture and music – both American pop and European classical music. To the cats we can add lame women because there are two in this story. Another theme of this......more

Quotes

Praise for The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle:

"A labyrinth designed by a master, at once familiar and irresistibly strange."--Janice P. Nimura, San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle

Murakami [is] some kind of wizard...The apparent simplicity of his expression... nearly disguises the fact that The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is, in the most time-honored sense, an epic...Every character, every story, nearly every circumstantial detail, appears to connect with every other in some ectoplasmic cat's cradle."--Luc Sante, New York

Mesmerizing...A major work...A love story one minute, a detective story the next, a psychological thriller, a New Age--ish bildungsroman, a sober chronicle of wartime atrocities, a meditation on historical guilt, and more, in dizzying succession...Murakami's most ambitious attempt yet to stuff all of modern Japan into a single fictional edifice."  --Elizabeth Ward, Washington Post Book World

A postwar successor [to] the Big Three of modern Japanese literature--Mishima, Kawabata, and Tanizaki...A cool forty-eight-year-old who once ran a jazz bar [and] has translated John Irving, Truman Capote, and Raymond Carver into Japanese, [Murakami] has been perfectly positioned to serve as the voice of hip, Westernized Japan...Yet none of his earlier books prepare one for his massive new Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which digs relentlessly into the buried secrets of Japan's recent past."    --Pico Iyer, Time

A bold and generous book...Straight-ahead storytelling [that] never loses its propulsive force...Western critics searching for parallels have variously likened him to Raymond Carver, Raymond Chandler, Arthur C. Clarke, Don DeLillo, Philip K. Dick, Bret Easton Ellis, and Thomas Pynchon--a roster so ill assorted that Murakami may in fact be an original." --Jamie James, New York Times Book Review

A beguiling sense of mystery suffuses The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and draws us irresistibly and ever deeper into the phantasmagoria of pain and memory... 'Every secret struggles to reveal itself,' Isaac Bashevis Singer once wrote. That's exactly what happens [here], and that's precisely why the book is so compelling and ultimately so convincing." --Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times Book Review

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