In Haruki Murakami's latest novel, two
childhood sweethearts discover their love years later.
SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE
SUN By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Philip Gabriel. 213 pp. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
They were just an ordinary lonely boy and an ordinary lonely girl, like all the others,'' Haruki Murakami wrote in his wistful fairy tale On Seeing the 100 Percent Perfect Girl One Beautiful April Morning. ''But they believed with their whole hearts that somewhere in the world there lived the 100 percent perfect boy and the 100 percent perfect girl for them. Yes, they believed in a miracle. And that miracle actually happened.'' But can the miraculous really be attained so easily? No sooner have they found each other than the doubtful couple decide, by fairy-tale stricture, to put their love to the test. They make a fatal pact to separate, certain that if they really are perfect for each other, their paths will cross again. The years slip by, and it's not until they've reached their 30's that one morning they accidentally meet each other on the street. By then it's too late. With only ''the faintest gleam of their lost memories'' in their hearts, they pass each other by and disappear into the crowd.
Murakami's latest novel, South of the Border, West of the Sun, also concerns the plight of a pair of lovers. Only this time the couple, even though they are too young to fully realize their fated rightness when they separate, never lose their vivid memories of each other. Their recognition, when they meet years later, is one of joyous disbelief, and in this version of the tale Murakami contemplates the way in which memory not only lingers but gives rise to overwhelming longing for the unreclaimable past (an achievement only somewhat diminished by the limitations of Philip Gabriel's at times jarring translation).
When Hajime and Shimamoto first meet, they are 12 years old. Polio has left Shimamoto lame and her defenses strong -- she is precocious and self-possessed -- but Hajime detects something softer: ''Something very much like a child playing hide-and-seek, hidden deep within her, yet hoping to be found.'' After school, they spend idyllic hours on the sofa drinking tea while listening to Shimamoto's father's records -- Nat (King) Cole, Liszt's piano concertos, the Peer Gynt Suite. When she momentarily, almost distractedly, grasps his hand one day, his erotic fate, though he doesn't realize it then, is sealed: ''It was merely the small, warm hand of a 12-year-old girl, yet those five fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know -- and everything I had to know.'' The 10 seconds of their single physical exchange constitute the first stirrings of his sexual awakening.
Their expulsion from paradise comes at the end of the school year. Hajime moves to a nearby town, and the small distance, given their age, is all it takes to sever their connection. He visits Shimamoto a few times, and then, increasingly immersed in his new world, he simply stops. His high school years pass in typical alienated fashion -- with Hajime in the bedroom, the door shut -- until he finds a girlfriend, Izumi, a kind of ''Splendor in the Grass'' Natalie Wood: what he craves, she resists, and they proceed haltingly until Hajime meets the first woman he sleeps with, the first woman to arouse and respond to the intensity of his sexual yearning.
The woman happens to be Izumi's cousin, and they proceed by way of naked instinct. The fact that this ''necessary, natural act, one allowing no room for doubt'' succeeds in destroying another person -- Izumi discovers the betrayal -- is something Hajime could have had no way of anticipating, or any way of averting, and he reaches a cruel realization: that sexual passion has no moral dimension; he feels oddly guiltless. ''It has nothing to do with us,'' he says by way of useless explanation to Izumi. For the first time in his life he wonders, bewildered, who he really is, and for the first time understands that he is defined and motivated by what just about every writer has a particular name for -- Chekhov refers to it as ''irresistible force,'' Goethe as ''elective affinity''; Murakami calls it ''magnetism.''
The event recalls an episode in Murakami's remarkable last (and more ambitious) novel, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In one of the most succinct and brutally frank letters in literature concerning sexual betrayal, an estranged wife writes to her husband: ''At that time, my body experienced this violent, irrepressible hunger. I could do nothing to resist it. Why such things happen I have no idea. All I can say is that it did happen.'' This inexplicable hunger is the true subject of South of the Border, West of the Sun. And in the story's spareness and quiet eroticism, it is tempting to make a correlation with some of the celebrated novels of Junichiro Tanizaki and Yasunari Kawabata, predecessors whose work Murakami has always distanced himself from in favor of Western influences like Fitzgerald and Chandler. But there's nothing decadent or perverse about Murakami's eroticism. Nor is there anything gratuitous or transgressive about it. That he manages, in his sexual explicitness, to make intimacy real -- appealing and unembarrassing, innocent even -- stands him in contrast to the work of many American writers, from A. M. Homes to Bret Easton Ellis, whose treatment of the sexual has been one of calculated offensiveness.
Hajime drifts through his 20's, finally marrying a younger woman he meets by accident on the street. He goes to work for his father-in-law, a shady operator in the construction business who gives him the capital to open his own nightclub, and before long, accoutered in Soprani and Rossetti, he's driving around in a BMW 320 listening to Schubert's Winterreise. But he can't escape the nagging sense of the inauthenticity, the unreality, of his life, and he begins to long for the purity of his youth, when he was miserable but ''pared down to the essentials'' -- when the only thing he sought was ''the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial.''
Inevitably, Shimamoto makes an appearance. She and Hajime meet at the club one night and fall into conversation that has both the out-of-kilter feeling of a dream sequence and the clang of actual grown-up talk, which underscores the loss of their innocence. A worldly crassness has marked them both. And Shimamoto's fata morgana quality -- she will reveal nothing about her present circumstances and passes without warning from Hajime's life for months at a time -- suggests ties to a more corrupt and sinister world from which she is unable to escape. When she leaves the club that evening, Hajime is left wondering whether he hasn't just dreamed it all. Only objects remain: an empty glass and lipstick-stained Salems stubbed out in the ashtray. But are they actually proof of anything? The surrealism that has become a hallmark of Murakami's work arises here from the kind of extreme emotional state that can loosen reality from its moorings.
Midway through the novel, the tone begins to shift, taking on a poetic, sensual and increasingly vertiginous cast. The mad love that Hajime succumbs to, and that renders all else in his life meaningless, at last delivers him to a state of purity. His passion -- itself a form of recovered innocence -- is all consuming; he is willing for it to be annihilating.
But, as with the fairy-tale couple who are no longer able to recognize each other after long separation, Hajime and Shimamoto are also incapable of resurrecting the lost perfection of their youth. There is only the empty, endless expanse ahead, from which there is no escape, not for anyone. ''The sad truth is that certain types of things can't go backward,'' Shimamoto tells Hajime. ''Once they start going forward, no matter what you do, they can't go back the way they were. If even one little thing goes awry, then that's how it will stay forever.'' This wise and beautiful book is full of hidden truths, but perhaps this is its most essential one, unbearable though it may be to contemplate.