South of the Border, West of the Sun in Reading with Style

Oct 30, 2020 Ann rated it liked it

Shelves: 2020, rws-fall-20

A well-written, single-day read about a man having a midlife crisis. Not exactly anything I care about.

However, I feel like there are layers to this story that I am missing as a westerner. Pretty sure that Shimamoto was a ghost, or some spirit. I mean, no matter how you interpret her (real, imaginary, living, dead), Hajime is haunted by her. It does not really matter if that is a literal haunting or not.
But having recently watched Lovecraft Country, as the headed toward the cabin in the wood I w ...more

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Jun 02, 2020 Joanna rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: passport, audiobooks, 2020-read, pas-readit-2020, rws-2020-summer

Somehow, I had in my head that this was short stories, but it isn't, which continued to be disconcerting for the first half of the book. Each time the chapter changed, I expected a new story, then discovered that it was more about the same character.

I always enjoy Murakami. He has a way of writing about characters where things are just slightly off-kilter. Characters do unexpected things that are following some sort of logic that feels just out of reach or otherworldly somehow. In another autho ...more

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Jul 13, 2011 Jama rated it really liked it · review of another edition

What a suprise to read a book by Murakami which is so subtle and condensed and with such a tight, and successful, ending. I worried that the lack of the fantastic, which I find so appealing in his other books, would render the book dull. Quite the opposite, I found his focus on the very real dilemna his protaganist faced made the book feel more insightful and profound. This would be a good book to introduce a mainstream reader to Murakami.

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