Rating: 
Summary: A story of magic and love
Review: Haruki Murakami's new novel is intriguing and romantic. We follow the hero Hajime's life from his childhood in middle class suburbs, through uninspiring years of college study and office work to an enviable situation of a bar owner; a loved husband and a loving father. Through charm, straight thinking and good luck Hajime achieves glamour and economic comfort but his introspection leads him again and again to his teenage loves and hurts. He regrets losing touch with his junior high school soul mate called Shimamoto (we never learn her first name) and agonizes over his betrayal of Izumi. While the novel's story unfolds in powerful narration (rendered simple, elegant and slightly colloquial by the translator Philip Gabriel), Shimamoto appears in Hajime's midlife as a beautiful and mysterious woman. She never reveals much about herself but the reader gets an impression of a fragile and tenuous life that can be extinguished at any time. Hajime unravels his charmed life through introspection and a romance with Shimamoto. The reader is taken on a magical tour of flashbacks as Hajime struggles to deal with his quandary of passion and obligation. Shimamoto is a figment of his imagination as much as a real person in this romantic narrative that combines a view of contemporary Tokyo with the magic of the occult. Murakami writes well and captivates the reader. His characters are not meant to be lifelike but rather reflections of our aspirations and desires.
Rating: 
Summary: He aint tobacco
Review: Imagine we're spies. You and I. Imagine we're spies in a story written by Calvino. There's a rendezvous, down by the foggy dockside in the middle hours of some wintry night. You're nervous. It feels like a trap. You've not been given a lot of instructions and you feel weary. You know you're to meet somebody and you've been told to expect some kind of package. In the past, the packages have all been book-shaped. On this occasion, the package slipped between your hands in the dark surprises you : it feels like a bottle. You walk along the gang-planks, holding the package like a wrung dishcloth. Curiousity gets the better of you and you tear back the brown paper and string. It is a bottle. The word "Murakami" is written on the label. Nothing else. Just "Murakami". You've heard about Murakami. You've been told Murakami never crumbles or flakes, that he's never raw or overcooked. You been told that you wont find him stuck between your teeth, like spinach, or lodged undigested in your colon like a chunk of red meat. You've been told he ain't tobacco : you don't gotta bite off a hunk and chew. You unscrew the lid and swig. You drink Murakami. He eases down your throat and leaves a warm glow in your belly. He's an internal Ray Carver (cos Ray Carver is like a roaring fire in Winter, you hold your snow-wet hands there and thrill at how weird and good it feels), warming you from the inside out. Good whisky as opposed to Good Raymond. At first, the taste is bitter and strong, like whisky. The drink conjures images : a man called Hajime, his childhood sweetheart Shomamoto, his first girlfriend Izumi, his wife Yukiko, their children. There is simplicity, deceptive simplicity. The whisky makes things clear. You recognise these people and understand what it is they feel. Hajime loses touch with Shomamoto, breaks Izumi's heart. You know that these things can happen. You have lost touch with others. You have broken hearts. You feel intoxicated. The more you drink, the less like whisky it tastes. The flavour swirls around inside you, more smoke than liquid. You can't reduce whatever it is your drinking down to its constituent parts. It isn't that the images make less sense and more that you distantly perceive some greater truth being brought to bear. Izumi's broken heart changes her life. Hajime learns his wife, Yokiko, had a similar experience, attempted suicide. The reappearance of Shomamoto draws Hajime down a path not taken, down through a bottle neck. You wonder if this is some kind of meditation on karma. Some kind of love story. Some kind of mystery. Or merely a trauma. Later, nursing an empty bottle in the harsher light of day, you wonder if perhaps Hajime imagined a greater portion of the action, if the story isn't in fact the story of a kind of breakdown. Holding that empty bottle, that read book, up to the light, you think about the love you've seen here, the glow from the lamps and the moon, the sense of a secret passed between people who know.
Rating: 
Summary: A compelling tale of memory and regret
Review: I've read a number of Murakami's books. I consider The Wind Up Bird Chronicle be a masterpiece, and others (e.g., Dance Dance Dance) to be closer to mediocre. I found this one to be in the same league as Wind Up Bird Chronicle, but its also a far simpler and more direct, elegant story. The translation is excellent, and the story itself is compelling and, in places, heartbreaking. Murakami really understands the male soul and knows how to weave interesting stories around its travails. This is a great, if somewhat short read.
Rating:
Summary: North of the sun, south of the moon
Review: Murakami veawes his own universes where you can choose to follow him or choose to let him go (and be you bligh and bonny). In this book he describes a teenagers/mans life and his obsession with purity and love before sex comes into the picture. It starts when he gets to know a teenage girl (his own age) who is also an outsider. Trough long walks and talks, music and sharing space they become the best of friends. After she moves away from him he never dares to contact her again, maybe because he is afraid that his memories are not correct. Maybe because he brings unhappines to others (still insecure) and because he is also afraid to do this to his best friend. Or maybe because he now is afraid of being rejected as a man. He is in short obsessed with her memory and when she one night walks into his bar he wakes up and goes from excisting to living, from sleepwalking to being alive to the full extent. This is not the anarchistic Murakami of the Wild sheep hunt or Dance, dance, dance. This is a slower, more mature book, with little humour. But it is a book that grips me and let me live another persons life and which make me rethink my own obsessions, my escapees (where ever they are) and which gives a lot. This book feels very honest and very real and it almost touches Ishiguro in its sometimes sadnes. And if thats to much for you, then let it go!
Rating:
Summary: it's more than you think it is
Review: I was surprised at the lack of crazy, wierd, jigsaw-like elements that there were in his last books. But, you can't expect a writer to do the same thing over and over again, no matter how excellent it is. At first I was disappointed, and I would have agreed that it was a boring trashy and unoriginal love story. But, I couldn't really accept that. I mean, he's just too good to do something like that. This story boils down some of the things that exist in his other books, in a harsh and unapologetic way. The main character is unlikeable, it's true, but neither is he dispicable. Murakami is just very, very subtle. It's a story of the ordinary,mediocre, and well-intentioned. And, who among us really lives like the characters in his other novels?
Rating:
Summary: why do I love this book so much?
Review: I read this book voraciously, unable to put it down, and had a tough time not resenting people and things that drew me away from it. After I finished it, I missed the pleasure of reading it. Yet for all this enthusiam, I can't articulate what it is about this book (others by Murakami too) that I find so spellbinding. I guess it has something to do with a feeling of familiarity I experience wandering around in Murakami's inner universe, even given how strange and enigmatic his stories tend to be. Some other customer reviewers have been frustrated by the stories unresolved loose ends: what happened to Shimamoto? what purpose did the Izumi character serve? I felt that in this book (as I did with other Murakami books like Dance Dance Dance) that these different female characters are really all one person or entity fragmented into different aspects: Shimamoto is the one that got away; Izumi the one you regret hurting; Yukiko the one you go back and really be with. What is the purpose of breaking up the "Other" mentioned on the book jacket in this way? It may be an attempt to tease out what it is we feel when we are in sexual relationships - the more elusive and amiguous feelings as well as the obvious and positive ones. If I am unable to come up with a satisfactory answer to this question, it still didn't prevent me from loving this book and feeling that unique sense of familiarity I mentioned before. Something like "oh yeah, that IS what it's like, isn't it?"
Rating:
Summary: .
Review: To me, 'South of the Border, West of the Sun' felt like a very minimal 'Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,' with the focus placed strictly on the love-story aspect of things. In both books, numerous bizarre little things pop up and then disappear without much explanation (the money in the envelope, etc.), and the ending tends to seem to be as much about what Murakami *neglects* to provide you with as with what he *does.* To some extent Murakami is very thought-provoking in this way. But to some extent, in the case of both this and Wind-Up Bird, I couldn't help but feel that he just didn't entirely understand what he wanted to do with his story. Certain aspects of the story can be left hanging in the air in order to deliberately create a particular effect, it's true--but I wonder if Murakami doesn't overdo this technique a bit? The envelope with the money is a good example: a small oddity that is never really explained or explored, it seems thrown in strictly to generate speculation; to, when paired up with other small oddities like it, create that surreal "Murakami effect" while, at heart, remaining just a little too arbitrary. I *like* these small oddities I speak of, but a part of me pines to see Murakami weave a new tale into another startlingly cohesive, strangely powerful anti-climax, like that of 'Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.' Not that I consider 'Hard-Boiled' Murakami's crowning acheivement or anything, but it's the one book of his I've so far read that, while still displaying all of the usual Murakami eccentricities, did genuinely leave me 100% satisfied. Not because everything was explained and nice and neat and perfect, but because it felt very competently *orchestrated* in the way it used its own imperfections to highlight its bizarre and unexpected ending (particulary in the 'End of the World' chapters.) By contrast, 'SOB,WOS' feels, to some degree, like it uses its (deliberate) imperfections as an excuse for a lack of clarity. It is still genuinely thought-provoking, but in some respects I guess I'm just beginning to feel like Murakami has it a little too easy. His books are all very similar, and have employed the same techniques again and again. They are *fascinating* techniques, but I'd like to see ... a more ambitious employment of them, perhaps? 'Wind-Up Bird' was a more ambitious employment in many respects, but Murakami refused to bring his intriguing web of surreal juxtapositions and cross-analogies together for optimum impact. He refuses again in 'SOB,WOS,' but it's a smaller and simpler work. Which on the whole almost makes it a step back. I love Murakami and I enjoy all of these techniques I'm discussing. I just want to see him build upon what he has, and after 'SOB,WOS' I just don't feel like he is. I'm nagged by the suspicion he's using his own stylized brand of ambiguity as something of an easy way out. I know that that ambiguity, and the refusal to give the reader what they expect and want, are absolutely vital to what Murakami is all about--and that is fine. I just feel as though Murakami dawdles a bit as an author: he has his own very unique thing going on, but I've seen it MANY times over now, manifest in more or less the same kinds of images, the same kinds of ideas, and in the same attitude; he seems either unwilling to do anything particularly new, or unable. Still though, even with this said, SOBWOS was well worth my time and ought to be well worth any interested readers.
Rating:
Summary: gripping
Review: Murakami's writing is testament to the relativity of love, the impracticality of romance, and the ability of the self to accept life's conditions.
Rating:
Summary: Haiku for the soul....
Review: One of the best novels I have ever read... In typical Murakami fashion the book is so sparse you generate your own "complete" novel somewhere inside. As can be seen by the reviews, some people didn't find closure; unfortunate for them. The only thing I can't understand is how the language survived translation. Perhaps a reflection on the universal theme of the story... Highly recommended. Try also Calvino's "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" for something that messes with your head as much.
Rating: 
Summary: Great begining with an unfair ending
Review: This book starts out great. Murakami's ability to draw the reader into the life of a sexually frustrated high school boy is amazing. He continues his ability to "awe" during the character's young adult life, detailing the drudgery of a college student's unfulfilled drive to become something special as his enters into the all too typical unsatisfying corporate job and short term relationships. With all this detail, I was convinced by half way through the book that I was going to get something mindboggling at the end. That I was going to be shown how everything ties into a larger meaning into this character's life and at the end I would be saying "WOW". However, it was just the opposite. Murakami missed the chance to show why the character's relationship early in his life really mattered. For example, although we get chapters of detail concerning the early emotional underpinnings of the character with his early lovers, the ending seems to leave the importance of the relationships unresolved. And that was not the only unresolved issues in the book. In the first couple of chapters, we are introduced to Izumi, a high school sweatheart of the main character. The details of this relationship are intricately played out. However, with the exception of two brief, and seemingly forced later scenes, this long lost lover completely drops out from the book. Although there is rumor of what happens to her, we never really find out. And except for the added unneeded sense of relationship guilt to the character's psyche (unneeded in that it adds almost nothing to the story of his subsequent relationships) we are only given hints of what happens to her. The reader is equally left guessing as to what becomes of Shimamoto between her schoolgirl days and the resumption of her interaction with the main character. Although she clearly has some deep scars, we don't fully know why. For example, we don't know any of the circumstances around the death of her child, even whether she was married to the child's father, which is hinted at. We are also not told what happens to this woman at the end, even though she is such an essential figure in the story. Rather, we are given just hints. Further unresolved is a why a man just gives the main character a handfull of money to forget about this woman. This man's identity is never explained, nor is his relationship to the woman, nor why, suddenly, the money disappears from a locked drawer in the character's desk. Although the author's narrative skills are gripping, I was left with the feeling that he just did not know how to tie in so many lose ends and decided to simply punt. The ending thus left me with a strong sense of "O.K., but what happens next"? I have no problem with leaving somethings to the reader's imagination. But, this should not come at the expense of a writer's responsiblity for writing, developing, and concluding a story. I admit that there could be another rationale, i.e., that all these issues were resolved in an underlying strata of the text and I just missed them. If that is the case, I feel that they should have been made a bit more clear so I could at least had a hint that I should be trying to read between the lines. However, even that hint was missing, or I missed it.
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