Love songs of a japanese yuppie everyman

Author: By Ariel Swartley

Date: SUNDAY, January 31, 1999

Page: F3

Section: Books

South of the border, west of the sun
By Haruki Murakami. Knopf. 213 pp. $22.

`Until I moved to Tokyo to go to college,'' writes the mild-mannered narrator of ``South of the Border, West of the Sun,'' ``I was convinced everyone in the whole world lived in a single-family home with a garden and a pet, and commuted to work decked out in a suit.'' Hajime, whose name means ``beginning,'' is a Japanese baby-boomer. Born in 1951 (``the first week of the first month of the first year of the second half of the twentieth century'') in a paradisical postwar suburb, he has grown up to become owner of a trendy Tokyo jazz club, driver of a BMW, doting father of two little girls. And yet, almost from infancy, this middle-class Adam has suffered the consciousness of original sin. As an only child he was an anomaly both in his family and in his neighborhood, the subject of harsh assumptions and consequent self-doubt. ``In the world I lived in, it was an accepted idea that only children were spoiled by their parents, weak, and self-centered. This was a given -- like the fact that the barometer goes down the higher up you go and the fact that cows give milk.''

Fans of Haruki Murakami's previous novels, which include ``A Wild Sheep Chase'' and ``Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World,'' will recognize the social satire masked as self-deprecation, and the deadpan tone which the author -- frequently compared to Thomas Pynchon -- habitually uses to describe both mundane and blatantly surreal events. But ``South of the Border, West of the Sun'' is Murakami's most domestic and perhaps most deeply moving novel. Gone is the peripatetic pace -- Hokkaido to Hawaii and many altered states in between -- and the private-eye swagger of 1988's ``Dance Dance Dance.'' Gone too is the expansive cultural and historical territory covered by 1995's ``The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle,'' in which a househusband's search for his runaway wife takes him backward in time to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, through a contemporary labyrinth of politicians and fashion designers, and into an alternate reality mediated by a troubled teenage girl and a pair of clairvoyant sisters whose client list boasts some of Tokyo's most powerful businessmen.

In its place is an almost-simple tale of lost love and, maybe, redemption. Hajime does not live his entire boyhood as an outcast: He is saved by Shimamoto, another only child. Sixth-grade soulmates, they spend long afternoons in her living room listening to Liszt and Nat King Cole on her father's prized new stereo, and talking with a pre-adolescent openness that becomes erotic only in retrospect. Like most such delicately poised relationships, theirs does not survive adolescence. But when she reappears suddenly in his mid-adult life, sitting with full cinematic force alone at the bar of his nightclub (the pianist plays ``Star Crossed Lovers'' in lieu of ``As Time Goes By''), it seems to Hajime that he has been handed an extraordinary chance. By consummating his long-lost love, he will be able to rewrite history, reenter the garden, and become whole in some way that has always eluded him. The problem, however, is twofold: Hajime is at this point happily married, and Shimamoto -- clearly troubled, evidently wealthy, and wholly unpredictable -- refuses to tell him anything of her present life.

For Murakami, as for cyberspace-envisioner William Gibson, the furniture of the mind is more than just a phrase. Besides sharing a generational fondness for rock 'n' roll and hard-boiled heroes, both novelists are adept at turning states of consciousness into a series of literally inhabitable territories. In previous novels, Murakami has taken a dream's cavalier blurring of the boundary between inner space and external reality. A door appears in a blank stretch of hotel corridor, allowing access to the past -- or is it the future? Women seem to morph into one another -- or is it the same woman? Despair becomes a form of house arrest, and characters do double duty, affecting the reader both as individuals and as signifiers of contemporary Japanese culture.

For American readers, the fact that much of that culture is familiar, based on Western imports and global brand names, while the rest seems wholly foreign, only adds to the sense of eerily layered and competing realities. Indeed, the experience is analogous to the one Murakami describes in ``South of the Border, West of the Sun.'' As children, Hajime and Shimamoto have listened to Nat King Cole's album so many times that Hajime can imitate the opening lines of songs. ``Of course,'' he explains, ``we had no idea what the English lyrics meant. To us they were more like a chant.'' And yet the mysterious words ``seemed to express a certain way of looking at life.''

In a switch from Murakami's previous novels, the land that lies ``South of the Border, West of the Sun'' is a frankly imaginary country. As adults, the reconnected lovers confess the disappointment they each encountered growing up, when they had learned enough English to realize that ``South of the Border'' was just a song about Mexico. In the heightened state of perception that exists just before the fall into adolescence, (for Murakami a place of sexual missteps and dark self-knowledge), where the slant of winter sun and every fiber of a girl's blue sweater remain etched in memory, Hajime and Shimamoto each constructed a magical country out of the sound of Cole's words, a place ``beautiful, big, and soft.'' And it is perhaps not innocence per se but the state of unfettered possibility which not-knowing makes possible that Hajime hopes to recover by embracing his past.

Shimamoto proves to be a far more reckless spirit than one usually looks to for completion, but the mystery that surrounds her is just that, something not explained rather than something that defies explanation. (One can imagine Murakami chuckling and quoting Freud's famous remark that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.) It is almost as if the novelist were suiting his structure to his thoroughly conventional protagonist, a man who might well have had three-quarters of a child, if only it were possible, to better fit the demographic profile of his generation. And yet, Murakami's layered meanings remain. Where once his ideas arrived exploded -- rather in the manner of an architectural drawing -- into separate three-dimensional images, now they are compressed into a resonant emblematic whole.

The past that Hajime, a yuppie everyman, yearns to retool is both his own and Japan's postwar idyll, carrying within its imagination-dulling tract homes the seeds of its own destruction. He should be an easy target: effortlessly affluent (his wealthy father-in-law supervises his investments), complacently unfaithful (``I never slept with any one woman more than once or twice. Okay, three times tops. I never felt I was having an affair with a capital A''). But when his daily routine of lap-swimming, child-chauffeuring, and gourmet grocery shopping is threatened, we root for its return.

Ironically, Hajime's true undiscovered country turns out be his wife. Yukiko's plumply serene domesticity masks a private hell he never suspected, which had been encountered and overcome before they met, and a tough-minded but unshakable belief in the earthly paradise that is possible only in the here and now.