On Murakami’s “South of the Border, West of the Sun”

“We were the two of us, still fragmentary beings, just beginning to sense the presence of an unexpected, to-be-acquired reality that would fill us and make us whole. We stood before a door we’d never seen before. The two of us alone, beneath a fairly flickering light, our hands tightly clasped together for a fleeting ten seconds of time.” – Haruki Murakami, South of the Border, West of the Sun

I’ve been reading a lot of Haruki Murakami books this summer and I was really hooked. There’s nothing fancy about the way he explains things or the kind of words he uses. It’s actually the simplicity that keeps it captivating. The way you may want something to be described to you in smaller, bite-sized pieces but is still full of flavor. I also find the kind of sincerity he emanates with the story-telling he does breath-taking. It’s just so sincere, passionate and nothing bereft of emotions.

This line is from his book “South of the Border, West of the Sun” which is a story of a long-awaited and closest-to-reality kind of love story. It tells of love as an eternal emotion that cannot be concealed and can only be rekindled. It teaches people to see that sometimes, second chances are better and there are things that are never-too-late to find and to discover and to lose yourself into, because it might be that core that fulfills that something that’s keeping you hollow after all this time.

All the dissatisfaction, the heartaches, the confusion and anxiety are parts of life. Even if it might seem a little hopeless and a little disheartening, sometimes we all must take that plunge we may never, in any way, be sure of. The book talks about social conventions and expectations and how we always find ourselves entangled with them; that sometimes we never know the distinction between what we really want in life and what other people expects us to do.

It talks about the “what ifs” in life. (I have a friend whom I recently talked to about “what ifs” and second chances. I’m going to write about that conversation soon. Hopefully, I remember everything fully).

But above all, the book talks about love in all the various forms it take when people feel it.

Haruki Murakami knows how to deliver such abstract realities into sympathies that people need. – @Lean_Santos_