South of the Border, West of the Sun - Hardcover

Murakami, Haruki

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375402519 ISBN 13: 9780375402517

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 1999

Synopsis

Years after their separation, two Japanese childhood sweethearts are reunited, and happily married Hajime finds himself prepared to risk everything for the chance to be with his now mysterious first love Shinamoto. 30,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and lives outside Tokyo. His most recent novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, won the Borders Original Voices Book of the Year Award for fiction, and was named an Editor's Choice by Booklist and a Notable Book by the New York Times Book Review. Murakami's novels Dance Dance Dance, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle--as well as The Elephant Vanishes, a collection of stories--are available in Vintage paperback.

From the Inside Flap

Following the massive complexity of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle--Haruki Murakami's best-selling, award-winning novel--comes this deceptively simple love story, a contemporary rendering of the romance in which a boy finds and then loses a girl, only to meet her again years later.

Hajime--"Beginning" in Japanese--was an atypical only child growing up in a conventional middle-class suburb. Shimamoto, herself an only child, was cool and self-possessed, precocious in the extreme. After school these childhood sweethearts would listen to records, hold hands, and talk about their future. Then, despite themselves, in the way peculiar to adolescents, they grew apart, seemingly for good.

Now, facing middle age, finally content after years of aimlessness, Hajime is a successful nightclub owner, a husband and father, when he suddenly is reunited with Shimamoto, propelled into the mysteries of her life, and confronted by dark secrets she is loath to reveal. And so, reckless with enchantment and lust, Hajime prepares to risk everything in order to consummate his first love, and to experience a life he's dreamed of but never had a chance to realize.

Bittersweet, passionate, and ultimately redemptive, South of the Border, West of the Sun is an intricate examination of desire, illuminating the persistent power of childhood and memory in matters of the heart.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375402519
• ISBN 13: 9780375402517
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 213