South of the Border, West of the Sun #

Author Harui Murakami
Date Febuary 21, 2025
Rating 4/5

Spoilers ahead

It seems as though the times in which I tend to read Murakami are rather weird, maybe it just happens that everything is wierd all the time and that becomes the basline, or perhaps Murakami makes things wierd.

This book is pretty good. Now, I often find that people need the characters in a book to be good for the book to be good, where they describe a bad person as poorly written, because they are a bad person, not because the author developed them well. This book fully explains Hajime’s actions and explains how he comes to do what he does, that does not make Hajime a good person, certainly, but that is not good justification for arguing that this book is bad.

It’s quite surprising to see Murakami bring an audience to understand a person’s actions, even though while we read through the book we completely feel that they are a bad person. It’s fairly interesting.

To some degree, I feel that the book feels almost like a what if for looking back on first loves or crushes, by taking it to the present and making it go in seemingly the best way (the best way when one succumbs to one’s thoughts in an unhealthy way). The sort of havoc this continuous looking back wreaks upon oneself.

Even reading Hajime explain himself and his thoughts at the end, I do feel quite irritated with him, because it feels like he both does and doesn’t have the capacity to change, and it solely relates to the comings and goings of the world around him (or the comings and goings of one person in particular).

Does it even matter if Shimamoto is real in the end at all? The actions certainly felt real, and the damage and pain he caused were real. That circular thinking continuously going on in his head of the past is damaging regardless of whether Shimamoto appears again, in the flesh or as an apartition.