Look at the rain long enough, with no thoughts in your head, and you gradually feel your body falling loose, shaking free the world’s reality. Rain has the power to hypnotize.

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

I spent three hours with this book in a bus this morning from Kisumu to Mbita. To the world woven by Hajime, of love, lust, decisions and young love and from the very first time he meets Shimamoto, he knows that she’s unforgettable.

He’s not a character you’d warm up to. It’s in his relationships with women that you could say he’s inconsiderate and selfish and as such ends up hurting the women he interacts with. However, it’s in Murakami’s style of writing that you cannot waver from reading the book to the end. And in a way, Hajime in peeling layer upon layer of the people in his life, perhaps finds the clarity of his own.

This book made me smile at the thought of rain in 186 pages.

Of his love and meeting with Shimamtoto twenty five years later, of the secrets she never let him unravel, of the grief she wore, the song It will Rain by Bruno Mars, is all I had in mind.

And at nine-thirty Shimamoto showed up. Strangely enough, she always appeared on, quiet rainy evenings.