Time out, South of the Border, West of the Sun.

I was on page 125, about to start the 12th chapter of South of the Border, West of the Sun, another brilliant and laid-back book of Haruki Murakami’s. I came to a pause. How about putting on some music? I thought . So I played Time Out, by the Dave Brubeck Quartet. My housemate just bought a nothing-special not-very-famous-brand home theater system. Anyway it was good enough for me to listen to music and see DVDs.

And then I went back to the world of South of the Border, West of the Sun, with a cup of black coffee ready at right temperature. A cigarette? Might be later.

A sudden thought of adding music to this book had struck me, like composing a music score for a blockbuster movie. Of course, Time Out was not the exact match to South of the Border, West of the Sun. What I really meant was the tone of the music did not actually carried out the mood of the book. The only linkage was that the music was jazzy and the book was indulged in a world of jazz. Anyway I finished the chapter fast.

I loved the story, as much as I loved this album. I always thought that I would love the track ‘Take Five’ most. I was afraid of things would change easily and nothings ever stayed the same. Anyhow, things did change, like I preferred the next track, which was ‘Three to Get Ready’.
I gazed out through the living room windows. The sky was partially cloudy. It showed no hints of how good or how bad the weather would be. I meant it was just an ordinary morning, like when you waked up in the morning from the long sleep and felt nothing extraordinary would happen. Sometimes the hue of the surrounding would change, when the mild sunshine came through the clouds. Bizarre. We always mention ‘moving clouds’, but we hardly see its motion. Sometimes we only know their motion by judging the appearing and disappearing of the mild sunshine. Anyway, I thought, the weather of this morning was perfectly laid-back, like a lazy student had forgotten his homework. It was not that type of weather you can call it sunny, cloudy, or rainy. It felt like as if the cloud was too jealous to let me got enough of warm sunshine, but I felt good because the warmth I felt on my skin was not violent. And its inherent ambiguity had made me difficult to forecast.

I looked up at the wall clock and it was 10 past twelve. The day became brighter and the energy which the sunshine carried is higher. So it should be an end of this beautiful morning. When did this beautiful morning have silently begun? Was it an hour ago? Was it at eleven something? I was not very sure, because before I realized things had begun in the middle of something. But I was very conscious about the end. Always. I would always check the ending page to see its page number without reading the end. I would get a slightly hint of pleasure of accomplishment by knowing how far till the end. Surprisingly, when I checked the end page of South of the Border, West of the Sun, and of course, without reading the last sentence of the book, there was a date written after the last paragraph. It was ‘16/7/00’, handwritten with pencil. It stirred my mind. A good friend of mine lent this book to me. I did not think that he was that type of person would compile a list of the books he had read with the date shown at next column, and it had nothing to do with showing off like the restaurant guestbook signed by thousands of customers. Isn’t it a mere feeling of nostalgia to have written down the date of finishing a book? I thought to myself. Of course I did not know when I would finish the book, but it would be soon, just like the beautiful track would end soon.