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I have a love-hate relationship with Haruki Murakami’s fiction. Well, alright, it’s much closer to love than hate, but I’ve been critical of his fiction before. However, South of the Border, West of the Sun must be my favorite Murakami novel – and I’ve read plenty.

Whether we like or not something can boil down to personal preferences. Nonetheless, the reason why I liked South of the Border, West of the Sun so much can be very revealing in terms of writing – and reading – in a self-aware manner.

In a nutshell, I’d say in this novel Murakami succeeded in understanding the critical connection between depth and width more than in any other.

South of the Border, West of the Sun: Genre, Plot, Narrative

This might sound funny to say, but this is the least murakamesque novel of his I’ve read. It’s devoid of magical-realism elements – see my review of Killing Commendatore – and, crucially, it’s also much less reliant on plot. Moreover, it’s shorter, more focused, and avoids narrative dead-ends.

All these absences propel South of the Border, West of the Sun toward literary fiction, more than any other of his novels.

The plot is very basic, which is fantastic news: Hajime is an only child whose best – indeed, only – friend is Shimamoto, also an only child. Just as they enter teenagehood and right as they begin to feel the first traces of romantic tension, they go their separate ways. Some 25 years later, Hajime is married with two children and the owner of a couple of jazz clubs. And that’s when Shimamoto comes back into his life, haunting him with impossible what-ifs.

Depth and Width

As I mentioned above, Murakami has succeeded in keeping his… pantser tendencies in check here. The narrative is almost flawlessly structured in terms of depth-width relation: Virtually every narrative side adventure is both short and justified; there isn’t any excess fat.

Of course, this allows us readers to get a really deep, painful look into Hajime’s soul. The pain he feels is palpable. It’s a human, relatable condition: On the surface everything looks perfect – he’s married to a caring woman who loves him, he has two healthy children, and he’s wealthy doing something he likes. Yet he feels a terrible emptiness, which is addressed only when his old friend – now a captivating, beautiful, mysterious woman – comes back.

It’s a tale as old as time, mundane and yet intimate: Should one throw away everything – everything, as Shimamoto ominously warns him at a critical point – for a morsel of eternity and meaning?

South of the Border, West of the Sun: Characters

The perfect narrative balance can also be seen on the characters’ relations and emphasis. The novel is offered in first-person perspective, which is of course highly suitable. We get an incredibly deep – though thankfully not unambiguous – understanding of Hajime.

At the same time, it’s a great thing that we get relatively little of other characters: Hajime’s wife, his father-in-law, and an old girlfriend from high school appear as facets of himself – the way dreams of other people reflect our own inner symbolic representations.

In a way, even Shimamoto exists as a peculiar reflection of Hajime – and the narrative subtly, carefully flirts with the idea that he has in fact imagined her return. Still, it’s her very ambiguity that, perhaps paradoxically, adds substance and texture. She is clearly and justifiably several clicks above any other character apart from Hajime.

South of the Border, West of the Sun: General Impression

To repeat myself, this is probably my favorite Haruki Murakami novel. One reason might be that it’s so literary-fiction-like: No larger-than-life plot, no sidetracking; only a short but in-depth exploration of a man’s innermost anxieties and struggles.

There aren’t any glaring flaws to speak of. At times there is a little bit excessive focus on sexual gratification, which is certainly justifiable from the perspective of the protagonist, but which could perhaps feel tiring for certain readers. But we’re splitting hairs here.

The narrative, in its entirety, is high-quality literature that flows smoothly and effortlessly toward increasingly more sinister possibilities. Its very ending is probably the only one suitable, and any disappointment the reader might feel has less to do with the narrative and more with the way this flawed life is structured.

In that aspect, too, South of the Border, West of the Sun makes a literary point.