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Zusatztext “A wise and beautiful book.” – The New York Times Book Review “A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other.” – The New York Times “Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami’s deeply original fiction.” – The Baltimore Sun “Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance.” – San Francisco Chronicle “His most deeply moving novel.” – The Boston Globe “Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale.” – The Baltimore Sun “A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer “Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic.” – San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle “Haunting and natural. . . . South of the Border, West of the Sun so smoothly shifts the reader from mundane concerns into latent madness as to challenge one’s faith in the material world . . . contains passages that are among his finest.” – The New York Observer “Haruki Murakami applies his patented Japanese magic realism–minimalist, smooth and transcendently odd–to a charming tale of childhood love lost.” – New York Informationen zum Autor Haruki Murakami lives in Oiso, Japan, just outside of Tokyo. Klappentext South of the Border, West of the Sun is the beguiling story of a past rekindled, and one of Haruki Murakami's most touching novels. Hajime has arrived at middle age with a loving family and an enviable career, yet he feels incomplete. When a childhood friend, now a beautiful woman, shows up with a secret from which she is unable to escape, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime's quotidian existence begin to give way. Rich, mysterious, and quietly dazzling, in South of the Border, West of the Sun the simple arc of one man's life becomes the exquisite literary terrain of Murakami's remarkable genius. Leseprobe My birthday's the fourth of January, 1951. The first week of the first month of the first year of the second half of the twentieth century. Something to commemorate, I guess, which is why my parents named me Hajime--"Beginning" in Japanese. Other than that, a 100 percent average birth. My father worked in a large brokerage firm, my mother was a typical housewife. During the war, my father was drafted as a student and sent to fight in Singapore; after the surrender he spent some time in a POW camp. My mother's house was burned down in a B-29 raid during the final year of the war. Their generation suffered most during the long war. When I was born, though, you'd never have known there'd been a war. No more burned-out ruins, no more occupation army. We lived in a small, quiet town, in a house my father's company provided. The house was prewar, somewhat old but roomy enough. Pine trees grew in the garden, and we even had a small pond and some stone lanterns. The town I grew up in was your typical middle-class suburb. The classmates I was friendly with all lived in neat little row houses; some might have been a bit larger than mine, but you could count on them all having similar entranceways, pine trees in the garden, the works. My friends' fathers were employed in companies or else were professionals of some sort. Hardly anyone's mother worked. And most everyone had a cat or a dog. No one I knew lived in an apartment or a condo. Later on I moved to another part of town, but it was pretty much identical. The upshot of this is that until I moved to Tokyo to go to college, I was convinced everyone in the whole world lived in a single-family home with a garden and a pet, and commuted to work decked out in a suit. I couldn't for the life of me imagine a different lifestyle. In the world I grew up in, a typical family had two or three ch...
