cover art by Jamie Keenan
Sputnik Sweetheart was first published in Japan in 1999, and translated into English by Philip Gabriel in 2001. It was Murakami’s first novel since completing his (at the time) longest work, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (whose last volume came out in Japan in 1995), and though he had brought out a non-fiction book, Underground, in 1997, he spoke about this new novel being an explicit attempt to restart his writing.
It’s told by a typical Murakami narrator (mostly unnamed, but when he has to be, he’s called K), a 24-year-old teacher noodling his way through a life he feels mostly disconnected from. He’s in love with Sumire, a quirky 22-year-old woman who might well be dismissed as a manic pixie girlfriend (she dresses in mismatched male clothes, and phones at all sorts of odd hours with random questions like, “What’s the difference between a sign and a symbol?”), if only she were, actually, his girlfriend. Sumire has absolutely no desire for K. In fact, she says, she feels no sexual desire at all. Instead, she’s focused on wanting to be a writer, and is busy churning out hundreds of pages of unfinished stories and novels.
K tells her she needs “time and experience” to become the writer she wants to be. And, as if on cue, Sumire suddenly falls in love, with a 39-year-old businesswoman, Miu. Miu offers her a job as a personal assistant, and after a while takes her on a business trip to Europe. There, they’re given free use of a villa on a remote Greek island, and the two use it for a holiday. Sumire finally declares her love for Miu, but Miu says she can feel no desire for anyone. She hasn’t been able to for the past fourteen years, since a strange incident occurred on a fairground Ferris wheel in a Swiss town where she’d been staying. She has never understood the incident, but since it occurred, has only felt “half the person I used to be”. Formerly a promising pianist, she suddenly found her playing to be soulless, and gave up. She has never since felt any sexual desire for anyone. On the night it occurred, her hair turned perfectly white.
The night after this rejection, Sumire disappears. It’s a small island, with few dangers, and nobody knows where she might be. Miu phones K and asks him to come to the island, but all he can do, when he arrives, is suggest she talk to the Japanese embassy and contact Sumire’s parents. Left on his own, he reads Sumire’s diary. Here, Sumire relates the story of what happened to Miu on that Ferris wheel fourteen years ago, after which Miu felt part of herself had been removed to another world. Sumire wonders if that Miu—the Miu in the other world—might be able to return her love. So is that where she’s gone, to another world?
Japanese edition
Sputnik Sweetheart is a short novel (particularly considering the doorstops Murakami has been producing lately: 1Q84, Killing Commendatore, and The City and Its Uncertain Walls), and it boils down one aspect of Murakami’s writing to its simplest form. After setting up the initial situation—in which K loves Sumire but she doesn’t desire him, and Sumire loves Miu but she doesn’t desire her—for the first half-plus of the novel nothing much happens. Things simmer, waiting for the story to emerge. People promise to reveal some important story, but first have to have a meal, then say they should go somewhere they can talk properly, and when they get there they have a drink and talk about other things before, finally, the story begins—but always with the storyteller first rambling for a while about how they don’t know how to tell this story. Then, suddenly—at last—a story is told. The tale of what happened to Miu up that Ferris wheel is like the intrusion of a scene from a David Lynch film or Robert Aickman story, a sudden moment of such strangeness it defies rational explanation, but nevertheless is loaded with enough meaning to bring all the laid-back noodling of the preceding pages into some sort of focus. (Though, having said it defies rational explanation, Miu’s experience could be read as a particularly intense moment of dissociation during a traumatic assault.)
This, as with so many Murakami novels, is a tale of loneliness and loss, whose three main characters have all lost an aspect of themselves that leaves them unable to fully connect with others. Sumire lost her mother when she was three, and after that her beloved cat disappeared in a strange incident where it seemed to climb a tree and never come down. Miu, a Korean born and raised in Japan, always felt as though she never belonged, and then loses that vital part of herself on the Ferris wheel that night. The narrator, meanwhile, is a typically distant Murakamian man, who asks of himself such questions as “Who am I? What am I searching for? Where am I going?” He’s good at his job, but he’s not exactly passionate about it; he has affairs, but never gets too emotionally involved.
The book’s title is Sumire’s nickname for Miu, who mistakenly called her a “Sputnik” when she meant “beatnik”, but the Sputnik reappears throughout the book as a symbol of loneliness. Although the word itself means “travelling companion”, the image of “lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits” becomes particularly poignant when you think of Sputnik 2, with its poor dog Laika on board—the first living thing to go into space, only to die there, alone. Satellites, then:
“From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere… Until we burned up and became nothing.”
By the end of the novel K is wondering “Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?”, making it seem as though, lonely as Sputnik is, it’s looking down on a world of loneliness anyway.
It’s not, though, a sad novel. There’s Murakami’s gentle humour (“If they invent a car that runs on stupid jokes, you could go forever”), and equally gentle mysticism (“Any explanation or logic that explains everything so easily has a hidden trap in it”). After Sumire’s disappearance, its final chapters are mostly lyrical meditations; the answers the novel provides are consolations, not resolutions.
It can, though, also be read as a book about becoming a writer. Sumire wants to be a writer, and at first writes lots, but lacks the “time and experience” to really be the writer she wants to be. After she falls in unrequited love with Miu, she is evidently getting—however painfully—just the sort of experience she needs. K had advised her, of her writing, “Give it time, it’ll take you under its wing, and you may very well catch a glimpse of a new world.” And it seems Sumire takes this literally, journeying to a whole new world in search of Miu’s lost other half, the other half that might love her back, like a sort of erotic shaman. And one way of reading the ending is that Sumire, as the narrator’s own muse, makes contact once more, having been to that other world and experienced loss, love, “time and experience”, and is now ready to write again, if only through K. (In the novel, K tells Sumire’s story, and Sumire tells Miu’s story, in a sort of echo of their unrequited loves.)
Jay Rubin (Murakami’s other translator) in Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words is dismissive of Sputnik Sweetheart, but his reasons all centre on its explicit use of the idea of another world, which he finds too forced. From his reasoning, it sounds as though he has no real feel for the fantastic or supernatural. (Perhaps the part of him that does is lost in another world…) I think the novel’s weird element works perfectly both as a poignant metaphor for the book’s themes of loss, loneliness, and creativity, and as a tale which walks the same line between dream and reality as you find in the likes of David Lynch and Robert Aickman.
