South of the Border, West of the Sun by Haruki Murakami

*Spoiler ALERT - unreliable narrator discussion*

It comes down to the missing Nat King Cole record and envelope full money for me.

On the surface this might come off as a mid-life crisis, with the lonely guy at the center going off course when a woman suddenly appears as a femme fatale with death in her eyes. If that was all it was, even done as eerie and coldly pretty as Murakami can only do, I probably would just write this off as an overly romantic slice of weird-ass Japanses noir. But....

When I got to the end of a novel and Hajime, the first person narrator, starts going on about 'alternate reality' and how because the senses and memory are so unreliable that you need external objects to confirm reality, but that this raises all sorts of problems because then you need other 'realities' to support the 'alternate reality' of the objects supporting the first reality and that this leads to an endless chain -- a chain that has been broken by the disappearance of the envelope full of cash. Now Hajime looks over the chasm of the broken chain and can't figure out which side he is on --
Well, this reader knew he'd better start questioning what is real in this novel. Most particularly is the adult Shimamoto, the mysterious fem-fatale, a real person?

I don't think she exists, excpet in the narrator's mind. If you go back in the book I don't believe any of the other characters in the book actually interact with her. Yes, I'm talking Bruce Willis and Haley Jole Osmond/The Sixth Sense kind of deal here. The narrator in this book is screwed up and playing a very odd game in his head - one that he isn't aware of but I believe the reader is suppose to clue in on by the end.

I've read other people's reactions to the book, questioning why there are so many loose ends and vagaries, and perhaps SOTB, WOTS is open ended and 'romantic'. But I like my interpretation, which seems to show the book is deadly sharp and anything but romantic.

I don't think Murakami is trying to portray mental illness, but rather playing with the consequences and selfishness of his main character's nostalgic desires -- and by making Shimamoto his character's hallucination shows how anti-life this force is. While Shimamto is the seductress/succubus manifestation of his hunger for the life of others, Izumi (the horrific vision of her at the end, who is also a hallucination, way too much of a coincidence that she suddenly shows up in a taxi) is the hungry ghost the void that lies within him. It all adds up to a bleak portrait of a monomaniacal egotist.

I'm sure there is nothing new in this interpretation, and a lot wrong, but it's my first pass at sinking into the book.