South of the Border, West of the Sun: A Novel (Vintage International)

by Haruki Murakami

In other words, she constructed a much taller defensive wall around herself than I ever built. What remained behind that wall, though, was pretty much what lay behind mine.

The feel of her hand has never left me. It was different from any other hand I’d ever held, different from any touch I’ve ever known. It was merely the small, warm hand of a twelve-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. By taking my hand, she showed me what these things were.

I was no longer alone, yet at the same time I felt a deep loneliness I’d never known before. As with wearing glasses for the first time, my sense of perspective was suddenly transformed. Things far away I could touch, and objects that shouldn’t have been hazy were now crystal clear.

But I didn’t understand then. That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair.

What confused and disappointed me, though, was that I could never discover within her something special that existed just for me.

I felt I knew more about her than ever before, and she must have felt the same. What we needed were not words and promises but the steady accumulation of small realities.

A simple change of scenery can bring about powerful shifts in the flow of time and emotions:

I stayed here, something inside me would be lost forever—something I couldn’t afford to lose. It was like a vague dream, a burning, unfulfilled desire. The kind of dream people have only when they’re seventeen.

On the bullet train to Tokyo, I gazed listlessly at the scenery outside and thought about myself—who I was. I looked down at my hands on my lap and at my face reflected in the window. Who the hell am I? I wondered. For the first time in my life, a fierce self-hatred welled up in me.

That ultimately I am a person who can do evil. I never consciously tried to hurt anyone, yet good intentions notwithstanding, when necessity demanded, I could become completely self-centered, even cruel. I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a wound that would never heal.

Just after I turned twenty, this thought hit me: Maybe I’ve lost the chance to ever be a decent human being. The mistakes I’d committed—maybe they were part of my very makeup, an inescapable part of my being.

Everyone just keeps on disappearing. Some things just vanish, like they were cut away. Others fade slowly into the mist. And all that remains is a desert.

Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free of the world of reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.

Things that have form will all disappear. But certain feelings stay with us forever.”

For the first time in a long while, I looked deep within my own eyes in the mirror. Those eyes told me nothing of who I was.

She took the handkerchief in her hand and looked at it. “Are you always this kind to everybody?” “Not to everybody,” I said. “To you I am. I can’t be kind to everyone. There are limits to my kindness; even to how kind I can be to you. I wish there weren’t; then I could do so much more for you. But I can’t.”

“Hajime, you can’t tell anything from photographs. They’re just a shadow. The real me is far away. That won’t show up in a picture.”

“Hajime,” she began, “the sad truth is that certain types of things can’t go backward. 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.”

If I could cry, it might make things easier. But what would I cry over? Who would I cry for? I was too self-centered to cry for other people, too old to cry for myself.

I used to like to walk the city streets, gazing at the buildings and shops, watching all the people. I liked the feeling of moving through the city on my own two feet. Now, though, the city was depressing and empty. Buildings were falling apart, all the trees had lost their color, and every passerby was devoid of feelings, and of dreams.

“For a while is a phrase whose length can’t be measured. At least by the person who’s waiting,” I said.

“Lovers born under an unlucky star,” she said. “Sounds like it was written for the two of us.” “You mean we’re lovers?” “You think we’re not?”

“Sometimes when I look at you, I feel I’m gazing at a distant star,” I said. “It’s dazzling, but the light is from tens of thousands of years ago. Maybe the star doesn’t even exist anymore. Yet sometimes that light seems more real to me than anything.”

“A world full of probablys,”

“But what is there, west of the sun?” I asked. She again shook her head. “I don’t know. Maybe nothing. Or maybe something. At any rate, it’s different from south of the border.”

So this is the face of death, I’d thought. And death spoke to me, saying that my time, too, would one day come. Eventually everyone would fall into those endlessly lonely depths, the source of all darkness, a silence bereft of any resonance.

She just vanished, along with her secrets. No probablys or in a whiles this time-she just silently slipped away. Our bodies had become one, yet in the end she refused to open up her heart to me.

Probably is a word you may find south of the border. But never, ever west of the sun.

Because memory and sensations are so uncertain, so biased, we always rely on a certain reality—call it an alternate reality—to prove the reality of events. To what extent facts we recognize as such really are as they seem, and to what extent these are facts merely because we label them as such, is an impossible distinction to draw.

took my time, trying to find the right words. “I always feel like I’m struggling to become someone else. Like I’m trying to find a new place, grab hold of a new life, a new personality. I guess it’s part of growing up, yet it’s also an attempt to reinvent myself. By becoming a different me, I could free myself of everything. I seriously believed I could escape myself–as long as I made the effort. But I always hit a dead end. No matter where I go, I still end up me. What’s missing never changes. The scenery may change, but I’m still the same old incomplete person. The same missing elements torture me with a hunger that I can never satisfy. I guess that lack itself is as close as I’ll come to defining myself. For your sake, I’d like to become a new person. It may not be easy, but if I give it my best shot, perhaps I can manage to change. The truth is, though, if put in the same situation again, I might very well do the same thing all over. I might very well hurt you all over again. I can’t promise anything. That’s what I meant when I said I had no right. I just don’t have the confidence to win over that force in me.”

Still, something is chasing me. I wake up in the middle of the night, covered in sweat. I’m being chased by what I threw away. You think you’re the only one being chased, but you’re wrong. You’re not the only one who’s thrown away something, who’s lost something.