South Of The Border

West of the Sun is the title of a novel by Haruki Murakami. Many consider this novel to be his finest work. I can't say that I enjoyed it as much as I would say that the novel definitely tapped into emotional wells of pus of mine that needed draining. I'm not sure they've been drained entirely, but at least I now know that they're there. 

The novel covers the life of the protagonist from adolescence to middle age. The protagonist is an only child and has a childhood sweetheart (also an only child) with whom he loses contact when his family moves during junior high and the loss of that connection has a profound impact on him. The protagonist goes on to have a high school sweetheart and his behavior has a profound impact on her - in a bad way, and the damage appears to have been irreparable. The knowledge of this fills the protagonist with an extreme amount of guilt when he discovers this. At this point he is married - to someone who is carrying her own burden of pain and hurt which resulted in her attempting suicide and was just beginning to recover when she meets the protagonist and eventually marries him. While he struggles with learning about his high school sweetheart, he reunites with his childhood sweetheart who has become an exceptionally beautiful woman and clearly has secrets of her own that we never learn - other than that she lost a child, though it can be inferred that she is a woman kept by a very powerful man. The two take a road trip to allow the sweetheart to dispose of the child's ashes - and they finally consummate their relationship physically - and in the morning, she's gone, and the protagonist never sees her again. This throws the protagonist into emotional despair and the wife is now distraught that she is going to lose him.  At the end of the novel, the husband and wife move towards embracing the idea that they are capable of hurting as well as being hurt, but the only choice is to change as best they can and move forward.

Murakami has never communicated the idea that his novels have any sort of underlying messages or morals/agendas so I'm not going to ascribe any, but a running motif seems to be that relationships fail and that that can't be recreated as much as rebuilt, from the ashes as it were. Also, the women: the childhood sweetheart, the high school sweetheart and the wife have carried emotional hurt from prior relationships, and they all responded in different ways.

Personally, I was able to look back and see that I still carry some negative emotion about failed relationships, as well as relationships that never came to be. In the cases of failed relationships due in large part to my behavior resulting in hurting my partner, I found myself wishing I could get some reassurance that the other person was doing OK, especially for the ones who never got married. And there seem to have been quite a few. Intellectually, I know that I am not responsible for another person's emotional healing, but the negative emotion I still carry has hampered me from moving forward with other opportunities that have presented themselves. I need to embrace the truth that all I can do is change myself as best I can, and to move forward from where I stand now.