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Sputnik Sweetheart by Murakami Haruki
April 20th, 2009 by heimeai
The complete review’s Review:
Sputnik Sweetheart is a tale of unrequited loves and of those who, despite deep and close friendships, remain alone — all of us, Murakami sometimes seems to suggest. There is the narrator, a young teacher whose name we never learn (beyond the cryptic, Kafkaesque initial K one of the characters uses when referring to him). There is Sumire, the young aspiring novelist he loves. There is Miu — or a person called Miu (the narrator warns very early on: “I don’t know her real name, a fact that caused problems later on”) — who Sumire falls in love with.
The title is Sumire’s “private name” for Miu: she mentions to Miu that she is reading Jack Kerouac, and Miu can’t quite think of what kind of novelist he was, mistakenly calling him a Sputnik (instead of a Beatnik). Sputnik also means “traveling companion” in Russian, as Miu discovers, and this is how she feels about Sumire:
(W)e were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits.
The narrator and Sumire also share a similar Sputnik-relationship. They are very close friends. She calls him at odd hours of the night, she trusts him — but she doesn’t love him, to his great disappointment.
The gist of the story is that Sumire goes to work for Miu, travels with her to Europe — and then suddenly and inexplicably literally disappears. Miu summons the narrator to Europe to see if he can be of any help, but he can’t figure out what could have happened to her either.
This being a Murakami novel, there is much more than this gist, of course. There are also many small episodes, similarly significant, and ultimately feeding into and deriving out of the larger mystery.
Sumire is trying to be a writer, and even though she is apparently very talented she isn’t able to entirely control her material yet. The results are still too unfocussed. The narrator isn’t a writer, but he does have some authorial concerns (especially about his role as both “narrator” and “narratee“). There are a variety of attempts at story-telling by the various characters throughout the book. Communication isn’t always easy, and sometimes the stories are the most effective way of conveying thoughts, ideas, and feelings.
Among the few apparent clues left behind when Sumire disappears are two pieces of writing, both of which are presented in full. One, significantly, tells not her story but Miu’s. Miu had warned Sumire early on: “The person here isn’t the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be.” The story behind what happened back then is only revealed in Sumire’s tale. Not surprisingly, what happened to Miu — causing her hair to turn white overnight — fits with the general satellite theme: she was literally stopped in orbit when she lost her better (?) half.
Miu and Sumire, and Sumire and the narrator have good relationships, on a certain level. But Miu can’t return Sumire’s love, and Sumire can’t return the narrator’s love. Miu is also married, but she doesn’t sleep with her husband either. The narrator is involved with an unhappily married woman (the mother of one of his pupils). There are no happy sexual relationships in this book: the others that Murakami describes also aren’t close to any romantic ideal. Everybody is a sputnik.
The novel meanders along, building to Sumire’s disappearance and then the attempt to figure out what might have happened to her. Murakami does this quite well, but he goes about it in a somewhat roundabout way, and it isn’t always clear what he is aiming for. When the narrator returns from Europe, essentially giving up looking for Sumire, the novel seems to spin even farther out of control as he lingers over a completely different episode, involving his girlfriend and her son. But here Murakami is at his best, back from the dreamy and sometimes unreal contemplation of what might have happened to Sumire. The surprising and seemingly unrelated episode does, in fact, help tie it all together, Murakami striking the right tone and then bringing the story nicely together.
Sputnik Sweetheart could do with a bit more substance. It feels a bit rushed in getting to Sumire’s disappearance, not entirely developed as much as one might wish. Still, it is a nice, wistful read, a good short novel.
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