First published in 1992 as 国境の南、太陽の西, (Kokkyō no Minami, Taiyō no Nishi)Born in 1951 in an affluent Tokyo suburb,Hajime—beginningin Japanese—has arrived at middle age wanting for almost nothing. The postwar years have brought him a fine marriage, two daughters, and an enviable career as the proprietor of two jazz clubs. Yet a nagging sense of inauthenticity about his success threatens Hajime’s happiness. And a boyhood memory of a wise, lonely girl namedShimamotoclouds his heart.InSouth of the Border, West of the Sun, the simple arc of a man’s life—with its attendant rhythms of success & disappointment—becomes the exquisite literary terrain ofHaruki Murakami’smost haunting work. When Shimamoto shows up one rainy night, now a breathtaking beauty with a secret from which she is unable to escape, the fault lines of doubt in Hajime’s quotidian existence begin to give way. And the details of stolen moments past & present—a Nat King Cole melody, a face pressed against a window, a handful of ashes drifting downriver to the sea—threaten to undo him completely. Rich, mysterious, quietly dazzling,South of the Border, West of the Sunis Haruki Murakami’s wisest & most compelling work.°°°Haruki Murakamiwas born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives near Tokyo. His work has been translated into more than fifty languages, & one of the most recent of his many international honors is the Cino Del Duca World Prize, whose previous recipients include Jorge Luis Borges, Ismail Kadare, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Joyce Carol Oates.