Description: In post-war Japan, a middle-aged family man and owner of two jazz clubs is dogged by a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success and a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl. When the beautiful Shimamoto shows up one rainy night, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime's quotidian existence begin to give way.
Review Quotes: "A wise and beautiful book." -The New York Times Book Review
"A probing meditation on human fragility, the grip of obsession, and the impenetrable, erotically charged enigma that is the other." -The New York Times "Brilliant. . . . A mesmerizing new example of Murakami's deeply original fiction." -The Baltimore Sun "Lovely, deceptively simple. . . . A novel of existential romance." -San Francisco Chronicle "His most deeply moving novel." -The Boston Globe "Mesmerizing. . . . This is a harrowing, a disturbing, a hauntingly brilliant tale." -The Baltimore Sun "A fine, almost delicate book about what is unfathomable about us." -The Philadelphia Inquirer "Portrayed in a fluid language that veers from the vernacular . . . to the surprisingly poetic." -San Francisco Examiner & Chronicle "Haunting and natural. . . . South of the Border, West of the Sun so smoothly shifts the reader from mundane concerns into latent madness as to challenge one's faith in the material world . . . contains passages that are among his finest." -The New York Observer "Haruki Murakami applies his patented Japanese magic realism-minimalist, smooth and transcendently odd-to a charming tale of childhood love lost." -New York