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Considering the devastating review of this book on here serving as the only written evaluation of it, i feel compelled to write one too. Not because i want to invalidate the other review, but because i want to offer a different perspective. In addition, given Murakami's standing as a pretty controversial author, I think it would only be fitting that this has both a pretty negative, and a pretty positive review.
This is the first Murakami novel i have read, so I don't know what aspects of South of the Border, West of the Sun were aspects of South of the Border, West of the Sun, or aspects of Murakami. So perhaps people who have read more Murakami already probably won't find the ideas and concepts of this that interesting.
Language Learning Rating:
I'm going to make this quick, as I don't think there is a thing such as a novel bad or not suited for language learning. The novels best for language learning are those that make you read and make you keep reading them. After some point you want to be able to understand all types of writing anyway. That said, this book does indeed, pretty much throughout, employ a pretty basic writing style. The grammar shouldn't be too difficult for a non-beginner of Japanese, so if you are comfortable looking up words, you can give this novel a shot probably earlier than you think. While most people would probably say the easy writing style makes it better for language learning; you could of course also make the opposite argument, given that it does not teach you much complicated grammar or sentence structure. I think it's whatever. Read Japanese and you will get good at reading Japanese.
Entertainment Rating:
This is the more controversial part of this book. I know more people who think negatively of this book than otherwise. I personally enjoyed the book. This is almost a meme-sounding sentence about him but: Murakami has a way to make entire scenes sound pretty magical, and i don't think this is different in this book. The plain writing style probably plays a part in this. I like the writing style, but i can see why people can dislike it. English-loaned katakana words are used plenty, but i don't think its actually excessive to the point where it actually strongly noticeable and hindering enjoyment at all.
The story itself surely is something you need to like, and not everyone will do, at all. "Nothing interesting happens" is a statement i don't agree with. But if you want robots fighting against each other, or the protagonist fighting against other pirates, or some medieval fantasy group killing the dragon and saving the kingdom, you will not find it here. It is centered around personal events in the life of the protagonist, Hajime, as he is growing up, and then later during a few years of his adult life. It revolves around him and various women, but mostly Shimamoto, who he met in his childhood, and then later as an adult again. It focuses on moments that impact him, and the overwhelming part of the book is either those moments playing out (or rather Hajime explaining them from memory, I think), or him reflecting on them, and his greater life. There are a million novels like this, about a person, in what you could call a [some point in life]-crisis, and his journey of trying to get over it. I think this is one of them. Not unlike Faust, or Steppenwolf (I don't want to make the point that this novel is as great as those two are, but i think the theme goes into the same direction). If you don't like this type / genre, then you will probably not like this book either.
The following parts reference the story in direct ways, so if you don't want to get spoiled, don't read it:
The aspect that makes this story what it is, I think, is mostly the incredible vagueness there is surrounding everything. And the way the author conveys it.
The two most obvious examples are the scenes, where Hajime follows Shimamoto after seeing her on the street, later getting a envelope with money from someone, telling him to stop following her, and the first time he meets Shimamoto in his bar. In both of these moments we see the narrator very clearly asking himself that he isn't really sure if those moments were real, and he tries to clearly convince himself (and us, the reader) that those moments were in fact real.
The book leaves virtually all questions the reader has unanswered, but yet it has a satisfying ending. The biggest unanswered question is probably What is Shimamoto? and with this I don't mean, "Who is she?" "What is she doing?" "Why does she have money?" "What is her past?", but Is she even real? I think this is deliberately left up to interpretation, but I personally think the story makes more sense, if you consider that she never existed, and always was just an imagination made up by Hajime. This especially makes the previous point of the narrator trying to convince everyone that it was in fact real, even more interesting. There are more clues that the narrator probably is quite unreliable (Like that the song "South of the Border" was never actually sung by the person the book claims). To me this gives the book a very interesting dynamic, and it would probably be worth it to reread it again, with this knowledge. But i don't think I have the willpower for that. At least not in Japanese.
I am not going to analyze this book myself deeply here, or list any clues for why I think the story makes more sense one way or the other, or in the first place, why you can even think of it in multiple ways. But the fact that you can analyze this novel on such an extend, that you can interpret it differently, and you can find clues backing up these view points, makes it a great book, and this is what i consider fun in reading a novel.
Now i didn't unconditionally like this book, hence i won't give it 5 stars. For me that is reserved to my absolute favourites, and while this book was so far the best book I have read in Japanese, I didn't read many at all still. I really liked it, i don't consider it perfect. There were scenes i didn't like very much, but that is expected and i don't have a big problem with that.