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

by Haruki Murakami

What do I know about her anyway? I’d met her a few times, talked a bit, that was it. I was jumpy, fidgety beyond control.

It’s all right, her smile seemed to tell me. Yesterday really did happen.

I looked up at the sky and saw a bird etching a slow circle in the sky. Being a bird, I imagined, must be wonderful. All birds had to do was fly in the sky.

She placed her palm above my heart, and the feel of her hand and the beat of my heart became one. She’s not Shimamoto, I told myself. She can’t give me what Shimamoto gave. But here she is, all mine, trying her best to give me all she can. How could I ever hurt her?

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.

I was just confused, and disappointed by all sorts of things.

girlfriend. If she hadn’t been with me, my teenage years would have been completely stale and colorless.

But our interests were worlds apart. She couldn’t understand the books I read or the music I listened to, so we couldn’t talk as equals on these topics. In this sense, my relationship with ...

I could tell her anything.

whenever I think of her, I envision a quiet Sunday morning. A gentle, clear day, just getting under way.

up. I talked a lot about myself and my future, what I wanted to become, the kind of person I hoped to be. A young boy’s narcissistic fairy tales. But she listened intently. “I know you’ll be a wonderful person when you grow up. There is something special about you,” Izumi told me. And she was serious. No one had ever told me that before.

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

yet there was something missing, something absolutely vital.

Don’t do anything I don’t want to.”

Naked, we had nothing to hide. 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 accumulatio...

“But if you leave here you’ll forget all about me.

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

“There’s one thing I just can’t understand,” Izumi said. “You say you like me. And you want to take care of me. But sometimes I can’t figure out what’s going on inside your head.”

“You prefer to think things over all by yourself, and you don’t like people peeking inside your head.

You figure that as long as you understand something, that’s enough.” She shook her head. “And that makes me afraid. I feel abandoned.”

“But life isn’t that easy, is it.”

She was opening up to me, but I couldn’t do the same. I really did like her, yet still something held me back.

universities were taken over by their students and Tokyo was engulfed in a storm of demonstrations.

If 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.

Izumi could never understand my dream. She had her own dreams, a vision of a far different place, a world unlike my own.

The first girl I ever slept with was an only child.

For me the boundary dividing the real world and the world of dreams has always been vague,

I was always attracted not by some quantifiable, external beauty, but by something deep down, something absolute.

I liked that certain undefinable something directed my way by members of the opposite sex. For want of a better word, call it magnetism. Like it or not, it’s a kind of power that snares people and reels them in.

lived in an apartment near the west gate of Gosho,

the alarm clock near her pillow, the curtains on the windows, the black phone on the table, the photos on the calendar, and her clothes tossed aside on the floor. And the smell of her skin and her voice.

I suddenly wondered aloud whether she was, perhaps, an only child.

What I sought was the sense of being tossed about by some raging, savage force, in the midst of which lay something absolutely crucial.

I knew next to nothing about this other girl, yet her effect on me was profound.

The reason being that what we were doing was a necessary, natural act one allowing no room for doubt.

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?

Recognizing this was painful. But it was the truth.

I should have learned many things from that experience, but when I look back on it, all I gained was one single, undeniable fact.

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 co...

I was the kind of person who could, using some plausible excuse, inflict on a person I cared for a...

But in the end, no matter where I went, I could never change.

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. I’d

Linking arms with strangers at demonstrations made me uneasy, and when we had to hurl rocks at the cops, I asked myself if this was really me.

I couldn’t feel the requisite solidarity with the people around me.

And the time Izumi and I had spent together grew more precious in my mind.

I just didn’t make the effort to get to know my officemates on a personal level. I was determined that my free time was going to be mine.

the twelve years between my starting college and turning thirty. Years of disappointment and loneliness. And silence. Frozen years, when my feelings were shut up inside me.