books, page 1 of 137

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?

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.

Bug Jack Barron is one of those novels you keep hearing mentioned if you read about the history of science fiction, particularly the New Wave that revolutionised the genre’s literary palette in the late 60s and early 70s. It was initially published in Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds between December 1967 and October 1968 (which, if you don’t have your countercultural periodical publication frequency calculator handy, is six instalments), but the novel’s liberal use of swearing, drug use, and sex caused WHSmith, the largest magazine distributor and vendor in the country at the time, to refuse to stock its March 1968 issue, after which (because New Worlds had an Arts Council grant) “questions were asked” in the House of Commons. (Which you can read here. It’s quite short and mild and, despite the legend, Spinrad never gets called a “degenerate”. He’s not even mentioned by name.) The novel was published in book form in 1969.

It’s set a couple of decades into what was then the future (at least twenty years after Bob Dylan recorded “Tombstone Blues”, according to the novel, so after 1985). Jack Barron has a one-hour Wednesday-evening TV show, in which he invites members of the public to video-phone in and tell him what’s bugging them, after which he phones up those responsible, live on air, and gets them to explain. Things kick off when a man phones in to complain he’s been denied a place in one of the Foundation for Human Immortality’s cryogenic freezers. It turns out this is for legitimate reasons—the Foundation demands a certain amount in liquid assets to be assigned to them for the duration of a person’s freezing, but the man included his home and business in the calculation—the man, though, says he was refused because he’s black. Barron pursues the issue anyway, just to stir up trouble. The Foundation, at that very moment, are trying to get a bill passed that will grant them a monopoly on cryogenic freezing, and Barron has just enough clout (an audience of one hundred million Americans) that he can impact political decisions. This brings him to the attention of the Foundation’s president, Bennedict Howards, who tries to recruit Barron to his cause, by offering him a free place in one of their freezers.

But Barron has had an equally tempting counter-offer: politicians from opposite sides of the left-right spectrum who oppose the Foundation’s bill have realised Barron is the one man who could unite their supporters and get them into power as a coalition. So which does he want, immortality, or to be President of the United States?

So Howards ups the stakes. First of all he finds Barron’s ex-wife Sara, who left him shortly after he began his media career, feeling he’d abandoned the progressive political ideals the two shared in their student days. (Back then, Barron formed the Social Justice Coalition party, which he left so as not to compromise his TV show’s political neutrality.) Somehow knowing that Barron and Sara are still hung up on each other, Howards convinces her that if she can get Barron to sign his contract for a freezer-place, she’ll get one too. Then he ups the offer again, telling Barron that the Foundation has actually developed an immortality treatment, and that he and Sara can have it whenever they want. They just have to sign the contracts.

Barron, though, starts to suspect there’s something odd about the immortality treatment, and when Howards gets annoyed when Barron covers a seemingly unrelated issue on his show—a poor black man in the deep south who sold his daughter for supposed adoption to a rich white man for $50,000—things start getting complicated.

The novel’s style placed it firmly in the experimental, literary New Wave. Aside from the free use of the sort of street-talk (and a lot of swearing) that was probably how people spoke then anyway, there are occasional passages in a sort of Beat-style stream of consciousness (though these get a bit repetitive as the novel goes on). (I have to say I found the first chapter almost incomprehensible, but fortunately things settled down after that.) Probably the thing that would make it impossible to publish today is its racial language, though the irony is that it uses this language to say what was progressive for its day. On the other hand, its treatment of women is pretty poor. Sara, despite leaving Barron when he gave up on his progressive politics, gives up her own when offered a shot at immortality, and basically exists to worship him (“oh, this is a man”). Once she’s reinstalled into his life, she’s not involved in any of the decision-making, and doesn’t even seem to want to be.

But the novel is really about the battle of wills between two men of power, Barron and Howards, and the worlds (media and business) they represent. In this, it reminded me of Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, which is also about the contest between two world-sized personalities (Bester even gets name-checked here: “Jack could always stick a phrase in your head like a Bester mnemonic jingle.”). But Bester’s plots had far more incidents and ideas, and both of his characters really did feel world-sized. One complaint I have about Bug Jack Barron is that Howards, as a villain, is too easily needled into giving his secrets away. As soon as Barron even touches on a sensitive area, Howards breaks into a seething rage. He’s a cartoon villain, and how he ever made it to being CEO of a major corporation is hard to imagine. He couldn’t even play a round of poker.

Read in terms of the time it was written, Bug Jack Barron is a study in the aftermath of 60s-countercultural hopes and ideals (Bob Dylan, in the novel, is dead), in which once-idealistic people have been led into a world of “use me and I’ll use you politics” and world-weary cynicism:

“What happened to all the no-more-war n*****-loving peace-loving happy got nothing need nothing love-truth-and-beauty against the night Baby Bolshevik Galahads. Years happened, hunger happened, and one day, age-thirty happened.”

(Asterisks not in the original publication.)

Immortality, in the novel, is the ultimate corrupting Faustian pact, the one thing that would cause anyone to give up their ideals. As Spinrad says in an LA Review of Books interview from 2012:

“The initial inspiration for Bug Jack Barron was the way the question of immortality was generally treated in science fiction—that is, no one had seriously dealt with the inevitability that it would initially be very expensive, and that it would confer enormous political power on whoever controlled it, indeed on whoever might even be able to promise it one way or another…”

Against this, he says:

“…the only such power that could stand up to the power of the promise of eternal life was the power of television to transform, control, mutate, and manipulate individual and cultural consciousness…”

The perceived importance of TV back then is captured in this diagram from a Michael Moorcock article in the same issue of New Worlds as the final instalment of Bug Jack Barron, which places television right at the centre of the “Media Web”:

(Though I couldn’t help thinking of what would be the closest UK equivalent in the day, Esther Rantzen in That’s Life! — hardly Bug Jack Barron stuff. Maybe it’s a UK/US difference.)

Nowadays, with broadcast TV flailing for viewers in the same way cinema did when TV came along, Bug Jack Barron has nevertheless attained a new prescience. Barron, alone before the camera in his small studio, sharing screen space with video-callers, feels like an influencer of a certain type, even more so when you consider his emotive stirring-up of his viewing public. Back then, the idea that a media personality such as Barron could be considered for President of the USA was satire (Ronald Reagan was Governor of California at the time); nowadays, reality is so busy satirising itself that Bug Jack Barron reads more like a how-to manual—Machiavelli’s The Prince, updated for the video age.

As a novel, I perhaps found it a little too long (entire chapters were taken up with Barron coming to a decision), and only Barron himself felt like a convincing human being, but it shows how even SF from over fifty years ago can still feel relevant.

(Another thing reading this novel caused me to check out: What happened to all those real-life companies offering cryogenic freezing what seems like only a few years back? Some are still about, yes, but some went out of business. And the freezers were turned off.)

In Robert Altman’s 1972 film Images, Susannah York plays a woman whose life is invaded by a series of ghosts/doubles/hallucinations when she spends time alone at a remote house in Ireland. It starts with a mysterious phone call, where an unknown person implies her husband is having an affair—but the voice on the other end of the phone is her own. A man with whom she’d had an affair years ago suddenly appears, but he died three years ago. Going for a walk and looking back from across a lake, she sees herself entering the house. The filmmakers start playing games: the daughter, Susannah, of her husband’s friend is played by Cathryn Harrison, while Susannah York is playing a woman called Cathryn. In one scene, the two—with their identical long blonde hair—sit together to complete a jigsaw puzzle, Cathryn with her left hand on the left, Susannah with her right hand on the right. It all has echoes of Bergman’s Persona (1966), and more than a touch of Polanski’s Repulsion (1965). But does it all mean something, or are the filmmakers just providing a series of shocks, playing with significances? Well, you won’t find the answer to that question here. I’m going to look at another aspect of the film.

In it, York plays a writer, and we occasionally hear, by way of an inner monologue, passages from the children’s fantasy she’s working on. (Early in the film, we see books in her study open at pages showing works by Edmund Dulac and John Bauer.) The credits say that “In Search of Unicorns” is a book for children by Susannah York, though if you were intrigued by the whimsical, incantatory language of the snippets heard in the film, you wouldn’t have been able to go out and buy it, not immediately anyway. In Search of Unicorns didn’t come out till the following year, and by that point it had changed.

In an interview around the time of its publication, York said that Unicorns is “not just aimed at children, but adults too”, but it’s pretty clearly for children. (The book is not long, is large-format, and every page is illustrated in a sometimes naïve style.) The story starts with Hero, the Lord of Umbany (though Umbany’s lords only hold the post for a year at a time), setting out for a walk, intent on avoiding his lordly responsibilities. He meets Una, a “ladychild”, who seems to have just appeared out of nowhere—she doesn’t know where she came from or, at first, her own name. Hero takes her home. A hunter and poet, he’s also a painter, and when Una sees a mural on his wall depicting a unicorn, she’s suddenly struck by a passionate need to see such a creature. Meanwhile Obnokshuss, the Devil of Umbany, has his eye on her—or, more specifically, on her pink new soul. He likes to capture souls, keeping them in cages till they turn from pink to grey to black, whereupon they’re so lost to goodness that he can use them in an army he intends to unleash on the land of Umbany. But there are seven conditions which, if met, will free all his captured souls, and Una’s appearance is one of them. The final one is her finding her much-desired unicorn. He has, then, a double reason to capture her.

The setting is part stone age, part land of fairy tales. A statement near the beginning (“Now Ums, as you probably know, are very small people”) sounds Hobbitish, but in one promotional interview, York says she’d not read Tolkien. (And the rest of the story doesn’t feel anything like The Hobbit, let alone The Lord of the Rings.) In fact, one of the book’s plus points—and what drew me to reading it—is its air of naivety, a fantasy written by someone who seemingly hasn’t read any (but who has, no doubt thanks to acting in Shakespeare, a love of language, and a stock of archaisms to draw on).

It’s a simple tale, its ultimate meaning given by York in an interview:

“I believe all of us are engaged in a search for our own kind of unicorn, big or small, one or more, tangible or intangible… Your unicorn can only be yours when it is given its freedom and it chooses to come back to you.”

(Which can’t help reminding me of The Three Amigos: “In a way, all of us have an El Guapo to face someday. For some, shyness might be their El Guapo. For others, a lack of education might be their El Guapo. For us, El Guapo is a big dangerous guy who wants to kill us.”)

The 1974 edition of In Search of Unicorns was illustrated by Wendy Hall (who said York had very clear ideas on how the characters should look, as many of them were based on her friends and family). It was later revised and re-illustrated by Pat Ludlow in 1984, and I suspect one of the reasons (though I haven’t seen it) for the new illustrations would be that Una spends most of the first half of the book entirely naked (perhaps inspired by that John Bauer image), and that might have been changed as the hippie-ness of child nudity became less acceptable. (I also wonder if one of the revisions might have been to get rid of the line: “Hero was rather partial to ladychildren, especially if they looked small and fragile”.)

The text of even that 1974 edition, though, isn’t the text from the film—which was a bit disappointing, as it was the playfulness of the language that drew me to it, and that seems to have been partially, but not wholly, lost. Here, for instance, is the opening as narrated in Images:

All in a night, spring came, rushing from beyond the ends of the earth and spilling out all over Umberny, its sack full of colours, and buds and birds’ eggs, snails and tadpoles, rainbows and newborn animals. Bees hummed, mammoths gambolled, meadows rang with the plighting of troths, and deep in his ancestral cave Hero Fairbeard Frisky, Lord of all Ums, snored and grunted, stirred and groaned, and got out of bed to look outside. “Fiddle-fuddle, Umb! A thousand spitting curses!”

In the book, though it starts more directly and still has a little of that verbal playfulness, it feels as though it’s lost the far-away, wistful fantasy tone somewhat:

“Fiddle, fuddle, bother; if I haven’t woken in the deepest of Umish Glooms, my name’s not Hero Frisky!” To hear the Lord of Umbany, you’d never have thought it was the first day of spring. Out he had rushed of Frisky Hall at dawn—down through Upper Um, over the bridge, and out to the open road. All about him in the hedgerows snails scuttled, and little blue eggs fell plop! into nests; bluebells and pollywots waved from banks and far away in the Forest (where Hero was heading), baby mammoths gambolled and trumpeted.

Perhaps it’s significant that the narrative has picked up a “you”—a sign it’s being self-consciously adjusted for a child audience. (And surely snails don’t “scuttle”.) One of the things, I can’t help thinking, that added to its effect in the film is that Cathryn is telling this story to herself, in her own head, so it’s not being acted out or told to a child. This gives it a wistful, musing tone, somewhat like Oliver Postgate’s narrations to Bagpuss or The Clangers.

As another example, from when Una sees Hero’s mural of a unicorn. The film has:

Una stared at the carved, curving creature, delicate, questing, perfect, with arched neck and a single slender horn.

The book has much of the same language, but sounds like the result of a writer doubting their reader, and losing something in the process of making it all clearer:

A creature—a carved, curving creature, like none of the others—was leaping out of the rock at her, delicate, questing. . . perfect!

Interviewed at the time of its publication, York said “I worked on it intermittently for three years. In the end I re-wrote it three times.” And: “The main problem was simply getting carried away by the sound of the words, and having to cut severely to get the story moving.” As it’s for children, getting the story moving was probably a wise move, but for me, I’d have loved to read more of what I was hearing in the film, which was clearly driven by “the sound of the words”—something that has worked for children’s fantasy since Lewis Carroll’s Alice books.

York read the book on Jackanory in April 1974, and it was later staged as Searching for Dreams in 1990. She went on to write one more book for children, Lark’s Castle, published in 1976: “A stone with magical properties helps a wooden doll and other captive toys outwit a cantankerous witch.” The first edition seems to have a naked man running after an animated doll on the cover…!