Novel’s title: South of the Border, West of the Sun.
Author’s name: Haruki Murakami
Author’s nationality: Japanese
Grade: 5


A week ago I was reading the online edition of Peru.21-a Peruvian newspaper. It is a great paper because of the accuracy and diversity of the written information and, of course, the excellent quality of journalists who work for it. One of those writers is Alonso Cueto -a novelist- who has his cultural column every Monday in it. Reading through the archives of his columns I could find one of his articles, “Escribir en un nube (Write in a cloud)”. For that article my curiosity for Murakami started and now -that I have already finished reading it- my curiosity for read another of his book is alive as is my admiration to his style of writing: sometimes smooth and then strong. Alonso Cueto was right when he wrote “Murakami escribe sobre una nube, pero esta tiene la consistencia de una roca. Su libro es maravilloso -Murakami writes on a cloud, but this has the consistency of a rock. His book is marvelous.

I finished reading the novel (213 pages) this afternoon. The quality of it surprises me in a great way. I can see something called “maturity” in how he tells the story of Hajime (the main character) who had a special and meaningful friend (Shimamoto) since elementary school. As the time passes the two of them take different paths and don’t see each other for a long time. Hajime experiences many things, lives many new situations but soon realizes that he has hurt his girlfriend Izumi. That fact makes him see how miserable his life is being. Many years happened again and one day Shimamoto appears in a bar which Hajime owns. They see each other and things are about to start. It’s difficult for me to say what I saw in the novel because it is so full of life itself. Trying to get to the point I could say that there is a search in the land of feelings, emotions and memories that each human being has. There is a description of how in the discovery of our bodies, in doing what we desire in an egotistical way, we can hurt someone and ourselves in the same way -even though in the beginning it doesn’t seem so.

Murakami uses wisely 15 chapters in “South of the Border, West to the Sun.” His novel is built in such a way that is very clear for the reader to understand it easily and to differentiate each event that the protagonist is living. I have noticed, although I am not completely sure, that each chapter of this novel is divided into three sub-chapters, something that reveals why each chapter is so easy to follow on. It is great. I wan to finish saying that above all, his writing style is the one that expresses life itself, sometimes kind but other times very deep, all of this with a consistency that just few writes has. Great book. Highly recommended.

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and lives outside Tokyo. Some of his other novels are:
-A Wild Sheep Chase. -1982
-Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. -1985
-Dance Dance Dance. -1988
-The Elephant Vanishes (collection of stories). -1993
-The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (winner of the Borders Original Voices Book of the Year Award for fiction). -1994-1995

This is a small but powerful sentence of this South of the Border, West to the Sun (1992):
…As I drove away, I thought of this: If I never see her again, I will go insane. Once she was out of the car and gone, my world was suddenly hollow and meaningless. (Page 125)