A story of love in a cool climate, intensely romantic and weepily beautiful...it is startlingly different: a true original ― Guardian
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.
'Casablanca remade Japanese style...It is dream-like writing, laden with scenes which have the radiance of a poem' The Times
“A wise and beautiful book.” –The New York Times Book Review
“A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other.” –The New York Times
“Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami’s deeply original fiction.” –The Baltimore Sun
“Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance.” –San Francisco Chronicle
“His most deeply moving novel.” –The Boston Globe
“Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale.” –The Baltimore Sun
“A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us.” –The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic.” –San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle
“Haunting and natural. . . . South of the Border, West of the Sun so smoothly shifts the reader from mundane concerns into latent madness as to challenge one’s faith in the material world . . . contains passages that are among his finest.” –The New York Observer
“Haruki Murakami applies his patented Japanese magic realism–minimalist, smooth and transcendently odd–to a charming tale of childhood love lost.” –New York
