apanese novelist Haruki Murakami’s newest offering to the English-speaking world, South of the Border, West of the Sun, won’t outdo last year’s lord of a novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle: It’s simply different. Where the latter offered head-tripping complexity (if you read Chronicle, I promise you will never look at a well the same way again as long as you live) in a doorstopping 611 pages, South/ /West is much slimmer and a love story.

Impressively, in a mere 224 pages, Murakami sweeps his protagonist, Hajime, from grammar school into middle age. Echoing Murakami’s real-life experience as the owner of a jazz bar (before finding his writing groove), middle-aged family man Hajime seemingly is set up for life, a prosperous owner of several jazz bars (seed funding, incidentally, courtesy of a dream father-in-law) when . . .

Murakami admires popular American culture. Jazz, obviously. Raymond Chandler inspired the earlier Wild Sheep Chase. And the South/ /West title derives from a Nat King Cole song. So we are not caught off-balance, when shades of American cinematic mythology, She walks into Hajime’s bar right at his vulnerable age, when like Rocky, he wants to get up off the mat one more time and take what will probably be his last and best shot at romance, at the love of his life, at Her.

hat happens next is not Ingrid and Humphrey at Rick’s Bar, teasing out the emotional truths of what they think is at stake for the two of them. Murakami eschews the easy-to-follow answers of Casablanca. No, he argues that one of life’s deeper mysteries is at play here. Do Hajime and She fully know themselves — much less each other — when they begin to meet again, once more, in the suburban outreaches of Tokyo on those misty, rainy nights? Hajime’s object of obsessive love is, yes, that young girl for whom his heart first opened when they were much more innocent. Murakami devotes the better part of a chapter to Hajime’s meditation on what it meant, really meant, to touch her hand for the first time.

But is She the same person who walks into Hajime’s jazz bar decades later? Or is She now an irresolvable mystery, like Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”:

And there she lulled me asleep
     And there I dream’d--Ah! woe betide
The latest dream I ever dream’d
     On the cold hill side.

s said earlier, South/ /West is not The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and imaginative overdrive, but it’s scarily closer to where most of us find our lives lived (unless you really do spend much time lying in the bottom of dry wells!).

With its sardonic voice, its honesty about confronting some of love’s vexing issues, and its wondrous imagery (among others, the ashes of a child drifting to sea, the heartbroken woman whose singular lack of facial expression frightens children), Murakami offers a memorable, classic love story. With Mr. Gabriel’s fine translation, all the Japanese you will need is, “O-Bookseller-san, lay that new Murakami on me.” And if you missed it last year, also add the recent paperback edition of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle for a complete Murakami feast.

Copyright ©1999 Charlie Dickinson and Savoy Magazine.

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