SOUTH OF THE BORDER, WEST OF THE SUN. Haruki Murakami. 186pp. Harvill.

Paperback, Pounds 9.99. 1 86046 594 3

Books like A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World have established a distinctive image of Haruki Murakami as Japan's most contemporary writer, a man in love with all things Western, who writes slightly off-the-wall postmodern novels influenced by science fiction. South of the Border, West of the Sun should modify that picture considerably. Plainly and beautifully told, it is a sad love-story with a more traditionally Japanese feel to it, despite its immersion in Western popular culture. Just as the protagonist rediscovers his childhood sweetheart, so the author seems to be re-exploring his Japanese roots.

Hajime is growing up in a comfortable post-war suburb. An only child and a loner, he strikes up a friendship with a girl named

Shimamoto, another only child whose quiet maturity and self-possession owe something to the crippled leg she never complains about. They spend happy afternoons together playing her father's records. Listening to Liszt's piano concertos with Shimamoto gives Hajime transcendent and complex sensations that he is un-able to communicate, but it is American popular music that is to play the largest role in the novel. They listen over and over again to Bing Crosby's Christmas songs, and to Nat King Cole singing "South of the Border", and "Pretend": "Pretend you're happy when you're blue / It isn't very hard to do." Unable to understand the words, Hajime still associates the song with Shimamoto: "The song and the lovely smile that always graced Shimamoto's face were one and the same to me."

They grow up and lose touch. Hajime marries and opens a high-class bar, with cocktails and jazz. Meanwhile, he has had a relationship with Izumi, who never recovers from his leaving her. Emotionally burnt out, she lives alone for the rest of her life, her face so bleakly empty that the local children are afraid of her. Back then, Hajime was unable to understand what he had done. "That I could hurt somebody so badly she would never recover. That a person can, just by living, damage another human being beyond repair." As Hajime has damaged Izumi, exemplifying the book's desperate and fatalistic view of love, so Shimamoto will damage Hajime.

One day Shimamoto drifts into Hajime's bar, Casablanca-style, and as they talk the band plays Duke Ellington's "Star-Crossed Lovers". They go to the country together and at last

consummate their relationship, after which

Shimamoto slips away again. Hajime understands that she would have liked them to die together, and that she is never going to come back. We leave him resigned to the companionship of his loving wife, and perhaps even comforted by it.

South of the Border, West of the Sun constantly risks sentimentality, kitsch and excess. If it triumphantly survives them, it is perhaps because those things are innately part of relationships, and also because its aestheticization and stylization of emotion are akin to what Noel Coward famously described as the strange potency of cheap music. Cheap music notwithstanding, there is more than a little here that bears comparison with Yukio Mishima; a writer who might be considered as the absolute opposite of Murakami, and whom Murakami may well find distasteful. Mishima's beautiful description of a girl's undistinguished piano playing - "in the tonal colour of those piano sounds there was a feeling of intimacy, like amateurish candy made while looking at a recipe book" - would not be out of place in here, with Murakami's delicate and finessed similes. Holding hands for the first time, "It was merely the small, warm palm of a twelve-year-old girl, yet those fingers and that palm were like a display case crammed full of everything I wanted to know. . . ." There is also something Mishima-like in the association between eroticism and death, which is far less languorous here than its Western Romantic counterpart. Images of the void, the sea and the desert underpin the book's emotional landscape; although the desert, characteristically, is associated with a Disney film.

South of the Border, West of the Sun is impressively written and structured, with a deft use of repeated motifs. Murakami deploys and withdraws tokens by which Hajime knows his experiences with Shimamoto have not been a dream, tokens such as lipstick traces on a cigarette - redolent of song lyrics - and also an envelope, which disappears. Above all, the novel is memorable for its unflinchingly extreme treatment of romantic love, and its belief in the ir-

replaceable uniqueness and exclusivity of the rapport between two individuals.

As the old adage has it, there is someone for everyone; and sometimes that is exactly the trouble.