South of the Border, West of the Sun

Hajime has everything: a beautiful wife, two daughters, a jazz bar he loves in Tokyo. And then, one evening, a woman walks in from his past. Shimamoto. The girl he loved when they were children. The girl he never stopped thinking about. The girl he could never quite reach.

Drawing its title from a Nat King Cole song and a Siberian psychiatric condition — both expressions of the same insatiable longing for something just beyond reach — South of the Border, West of the Sun is Murakami at his most quietly devastating. This is a novel about the life unlived, the road not taken, the love that consumes you precisely because it can never be completed.

Hajime’s comfortable life begins to tremble. His certainties soften. His past rises through the floor of his present like something returning from deep water. What does he truly want? Can he recognise it before it’s too late? And what will it cost him if he does? Translated by Philip Gabriel with crystalline precision. A short novel that cuts deep and echoes long. Essential Murakami. Published by Vintage.