fantasy, page 1 of 90

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.

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…!

Four years have passed since the events of the previous two books in Jenny Nimmo’s Snow Spider trilogy, and The Chestnut Soldier (first published in 1989) feels a bit more grown-up, with boy magician Gwyn nearly thirteen and starting to notice girls in a different way (he thinks Nia Lloyd’s sixteen-year-old sister Catrin the most beautiful girl in Wales, but “Lately he had found it difficult to talk to her”). The narrative is divided between Gwyn and the now eleven-year-old Nia (the main character in Emlyn’s Moon), with Gwyn no longer feeling like the distant and wise boy-magician from the second book: he’s trying not to use his “power” (as he’s come to call it, thinking the word “magic” childish), partly because he keeps getting it wrong and making mistakes, but also because he feels he should be taller by now and is worried magic is stunting his growth.

One day, the Lloyds learn that their mother’s cousin, Evan Llŷr, is coming to stay. It has been ten years since they last saw him, and he’s now a major in the British Army. He has, though, been wounded somehow, and is seeking a place to convalesce. In his thirties, handsome and mysterious, he comes across instantly as something of a romantic figure. Nia thinks him “the prince from every fairy tale; he was fierce and kind—and immensely troubled”, and every woman in the narrative from Nia to Gwyn’s grandmother Nain are under his spell. Particularly so is Catrin, who neglects her boyfriend, an Irish lad called Patrick McGoohan, who likes to ride by on his horse to be admired, but now finds himself ignored.

The mystery of Evan’s “wound” takes a while to come out. It’s not physical. He went into a burning building while posted in Belfast, to rescue some of his men who were trapped inside, but he was the only one to escape alive. These elements—his being a soldier, an association with fire, and a potential friction with the Irish—act as a sort of mythic-magnetic pull between him and a story that has already appeared in the first volume of the series, the legend of Efnisien, who maimed the King of Ireland’s horses when the King came over to marry Efnisien’s sister, and whose angry spirit became trapped in the broken wooden horse that was among Nain’s gifts to the young Gwyn. Now, this wooden horse uses Nia’s younger brother Iolo to get itself free of Gwyn’s control, and the spirit of Efnisien enters, or blends with, Evan.

After this, Evan becomes increasingly dark and cruel. Poltergeist activity begins to surround him, breaking young Iolo’s toy horses and Idris Llewelyn’s carved unicorn, and driving Patrick McGoohan’s horse, Glory, to madness. Books fall off shelves, plates break, storms descend on the town, and the Lloyd home looks like it’s been hit by an earthquake. Catrin is hopelessly drawn to Evan, even when his kiss is rough and not at all to her liking. He becomes a sort of Heathcliff figure, romantic and dangerous in a way that skews into the supernatural.

Gwyn realises he has to do something, and after another few failed attempts which increasingly convince him he was never meant to be a magician at all, travels back in time to speak with his ancestor, Gwydion Gwyn, to work out how to deal with this demonic force. (Gwydion, who anachronistically asks “You’re not blaming your genes, are you?”, assures him that he, too, made plenty of mistakes.)

Like the preceding book in the trilogy, the supernatural element in The Chestnut Soldier enters gradually, at first being indistinguishable from the story of a troubled but handsome man suddenly entering the lives of the Lloyds. But unlike with Emlyn’s Moon, there’s not so much of an alternative story to be going on with while the supernatural builds. (In addition, although there’s just as much light comedy as in the previous book, it doesn’t feel as light, couched as it is amongst much more serious-seeming darkness.) In both books, everything is resolved in a brief but confusing showdown involving magic and mythical figures, but whereas in Emlyn’s Moon this released all the tension in the mundane narrative in a way that made sense, here it’s unclear how—or if—Evan’s real-life troubledness is fixed along with his supernatural possession. Things are resolved, but they don’t really feel resolved—though this could be taken as part of the series’ growing up along with its characters, having them face messier situations and messier resolutions.

I was disappointed to find no return of the faerie-like “White People” from the first two books, particularly as they were the most intriguing element, for me. Here, Gwyn only thinks of them briefly, to note that his sister is surely happy with them, so he feels no need to try and bring her back, and besides, he’s grown up and she is now a perpetual child, so what would the two have to talk about? It seems rather dismissive and cold, particularly as I can’t help thinking that Bethan’s supposed happiness with the fairy folk is the sort of happiness a cult member has with their cult—it may require deprogramming to reveal it’s not happiness at all. (I think The Snow Spider could do with a Boneland-style sequel, where an adult Gwyn has to either rescue his sister properly, or at least face up to the reality of what happened to her.)

Like Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (which Nimmo hadn’t read, at least before writing the first book in the series), myth, here, is a thing that threatens to take over modern generations, replaying its tragedies and re-inflicting its suffering. But unlike in The Owl Service, Gwyn’s approach is to fight myth with myth: just as Evan becomes infected with the mythic presence of Efnisian, Gwyn allows himself to become, in part, his ancestor Gwydion Gwyn. (Which leads to some comic moments, as this Welsh ancient’s presence in Gwyn leads to him suddenly finding all sorts of aspects of modern life hard to deal with. Only, as this happens in the final chapters, with the darkness around Evan building, it’s hard to really feel the comedy.)

The series ends with Gwyn saying “I’m grateful for the adventure but I don’t believe I’ll need magic for a while.” Which leaves things somewhat unresolved—he’s still evidently living in a world where myth leaks through into reality, so how does he know he’s not going to need it?

For me, this may be the least successful of three books. The Snow Spider worked as an introduction to the difficulties and wonders of this world of myth and magic; Emlyn’s Moon was the most satisfying as a novel, with its nicely-balanced magical and mundane storylines; The Chestnut Soldier seems almost consciously messier, reflecting the main characters’ entry into adolescence and an awareness of greater moral ambiguity, but ultimately ending in a mood where the characters just felt they’d outgrown magic, as though it were their choice to make, in a world that seems dangerously fraught with myths and faerie.

Like its predecessors, The Chestnut Soldier was adapted for television, being broadcast in four parts in 1991 (produced by HTV Cymru/Wales), running from Wednesday 20th November to 11th December, and retaining all the same actors for the main roles. Interestingly, in McGown and Docherty’s encyclopaedic look at children’s TV drama, The Hill and Beyond, they say: “The Chestnut Soldier loses the subtlety of its predecessors, opting instead for a more teen angst approach”—but as I’ve said, this feels true of the book, too. I can’t help wondering how this third instalment would have been dealt with had the 2020 BBC adaptation got this far. On the one hand, that series clearly implied that there was going to be more of a showdown with the faerie-like people who’d taken Gwyn’s sister, and their by no means friendly intentions; on the other, how would a 2020s adaptation have dealt with the romantic relationship between sixteen-year-old Catrin and thirty-something Evan? It’s accepted without comment in the book (even from Catrin’s mother), but I can’t imagine how it would have been treated in the style of the more careful 2020 version of The Snow Spider.