South of the Border, West of the Sun
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  • Published: 11 March 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473596078
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download

South of the Border, West of the Sun

Formats & editions
Paperback
1 Apr 2003
EBook
10 Oct 2011
Audiobook
11 Mar 2021
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'Casablanca remade Japanese-style': a moving, thoughtful story of long-lost love and second chances

Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch.
Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears. She is beautiful, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the present.
  • Published: 11 March 2021
  • ISBN: 9781473596078
  • Imprint: Vintage Digital
  • Format: Audio Download
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About the author

Haruki Murakami

In 1978, Haruki Murakami was twenty-nine and running a jazz bar in downtown Tokyo. One April day, the impulse to write a novel came to him suddenly while watching a baseball game. That first novel, Hear the Wind Sing, won a new writers’ award and was published the following year. More followed, including A Wild Sheep Chase and Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, but it was Norwegian Wood, published in 1987, which turned Murakami from a writer into a phenomenon. His books became bestsellers, were translated into many languages, including English, and the door was thrown wide open to Murakami’s unique and addictive fictional universe.

Murakami writes with admirable discipline, producing ten pages a day, after which he runs ten kilometres (he began long-distance running in 1982 and has participated in numerous marathons and races), works on translations, and then reads, listens to records and cooks. His passions colour his non-fiction output, from What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to Absolutely On Music, and they also seep into his novels and short stories, providing quotidian moments in his otherwise freewheeling flights of imaginative inquiry. In works such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, 1Q84 and Men Without Women, his distinctive blend of the mysterious and the everyday, of melancholy and humour, continues to enchant readers, ensuring Murakami’s place as one of the world’s most acclaimed and well-loved writers.

portrait photo of Haruki Murakami

Also by Haruki Murakami

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Vintage Classics Japanese Series)
A Wild Sheep Chase
Dance Dance Dance
Desire
Birthday Girl
Novelist as a Vocation
The Elephant Vanishes
See all

Praise for South of the Border, West of the Sun

Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic.

San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle

Discover what a fine writer Murakami is with this engrossing examination of a male mid-life crisis... He enthrallingly teases out the risks, culminating in a headily sensual finale

Time Out

Impressively written and structured... Above all, the novel is memorable for its unflinchingly extreme treatment of romantic love

Times Literary Supplement

This book aches...an eloquent treatise on the vertiginous, irrational powers of love and desire

Independent on Sunday

This wise and beautiful book is full of hidden truths

New York Times

Casablanca remade Japanese style...It is dream-like writing, laden with scenes which have the radiance of a poem

The Times

A story of love in a cool climate, intensely romantic and weepily beautiful...it is startlingly different: a true original

Guardian

A beautiful, atmospheric novel sustained by Murakami's flair for philosophical mediation at its most human

Irish Times

A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us.

The Philadelphia Inquirer

Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale.

The Baltimore Sun

His most deeply moving novel.

The Boston Globe

Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance.

San Francisco Chronicle

Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami's deeply original fiction.

The Baltimore Sun

A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other.

The New York Times

A wise and beautiful book.

The New York Times Book Review