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

by Haruki Murakami

“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.”

“You’re here,” I continued. “At least you look as if you’re here. But maybe you aren’t. Maybe it’s just your shadow. The real you may be someplace else. Or maybe you already disappeared, a long, long time ago. I reach out my hand to see, but you’ve hidden yourself behind a cloud of probablys. Do

Only she and I remained. Everything else was an illusion, papier-mâché props on a stage. What existed, what was real, was the two of us.

“There’s so much I don’t understand,” my wife said. “Tell me one thing: am I in your way?”

I’d always thought something great lay south of the border.”

Something beautiful, big, and soft.”

“A world full of probablys,”

“South of the border, west of the sun,”

illness hysteria siberiana?”

Try to imagine this. You’re a farmer, living all alone on the Siberian tundra. Day after day you plow your fields. As far as the eye can see, nothing. To the north, the horizon, to the east, the horizon, to the south, to the west, more of the same. Every morning, when the sun rises in the east, you go out to work in your fields. When it’s directly overhead, you take a break for lunch. When it sinks in the west, you go home to sleep.”

“And then one day, something inside you dies.”

Day after day you watch the sun rise in the east, pass across the sky, then sink in the west, and something breaks inside you and dies. You toss your plow aside and, your head completely empty of thought, begin walking toward the west. Heading toward a land that lies west of the sun. Like someone possessed, you walk on, day after day, not eating or drinking, until you collapse on the ground and die. That’s hysteria siberiana.”

“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.”

Nat King Cole began singing “Pretend,”

conclusion. I can’t make it without you. I don’t ever want to lose you again.

I might spend the rest of my life never seeing you again. And I couldn’t stand that. Life would be meaningless.”

A quiet smile that nothing could ever touch, revealing nothing to me of what lay beyond. Confronted with that smile, I felt as if my own emotions were about to be lost to me. For an instant I lost my bearings, my sense of who and where I was.

there is no middle ground with me. You take either all of me or nothing.

if you don’t want me to go away again, you have to take all of me. Everything. All the baggage I carry, everything that clings to me. And I will take all of you. Do you understand that? Do you understand what that means?”

The important question is what is missing. Something’s lacking. In me and my life. And that part of me is always hungry, always thirsting. Neither my wife nor my children can fill that gap. In the whole world, there’s only one person who can do that. You. Only now, when that thirst is satisfied, do I realize how empty I was. And how I’ve been hungering, thirsting, for so many years. I can’t go back to that kind of world.”

I stroked her soft hair and drank in its fragrance.

Once again we were wrapped only in the sound of the rain.

But I did meet you. And we can’t undo that,”

It was as if she were treasuring time itself. Stroking time, caressing it, licking it.

“But you are mine, right?” “Yes.” “So there’s nothing to be embarrassed about, is there.”

I recalled clearly what I’d seen deep within her eyes. A dark space, frozen hard like a subterranean glacier. A silence so profound it sucked up every sound, never allowing it to resurface. Absolute, total silence.

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. I felt a choking, stifling fear as I stared into this bottomless dark pit.

But my voice was lost in that infinite nothingness. Cry out as I might nothing within the depths of her eyes changed.

Her regular breaths told me she was still on this side of the world. But her eyes told me she was already given up to death.

As I had looked deep into her eyes and called out her name, my own body was dragged down into those depths. As if a vacuum had sucked out all the air around me, that other world was steadily pulling me...

Deep within her eyes, in the always bottomless depths, there was a spring. And, ever so faintly, a light. The light of life, I thought. Someday it will be extinguished, but for now the light is there.

If I didn’t hold her tight, I felt, she would fly off into pieces.

“I want to know everything there is to know about you,” I said to her. “What kind of life you’ve had till now, where you live. Whether you’re married or not. Everything. No more secrets, ‘cause I can’t take any more.”

Stay the way you are today. If I did tell you now, you’d never be able to go back to the way you were.”

“I wish tomorrow would never come,” she said. “Then you’ll never know.”

Bald vultures eat up art, and tomorrows as well.”

And tomorrow came. When I woke up, I was alone.

Nothing.

I took a deep breath, trying to pull myself back to reality. But that reality was like nothing I’d ever seen before: a reality that didn’t seem to fit.

The silence was oppressive; the occasional sounds of birds and cars struck me as unnatural, out of sync. Every sound was twisted and crushed beneath the weight of some unstoppable force. And in the midst of this, I waited for something to happen. Something’s got to happen, I felt sure. It can’t end like this.

All I could do was remember.

“How do you know what I’m thinking?” she asked. “You actually believe you know what I’m thinking?”

“I think it’s likely you have no idea what I’m thinking,”

I think you still love me, but we can’t escape the fact that I’m not enough for you.

I just feel pain. A lot of pain. I thought I could imagine how much this would hurt, but I was wrong.”

I’d recall ever single detail of the night I spent with Shimamoto, trying to tease out some meaning. Trying to find a message.

There is no middle ground with me. No middle-ground objects exist and where there are no such objects, there is no middle ground.

The smell of death hovered over her. She really was planning to die. That’s why she came to Hakone–to die, together with me.

But something stopped her. And holding everything inside, she disappeared.

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.