Japn 314 Sputnik Sweetheart III: 97-210
So, here we are at the end of Sputnik Sweetheart. Alas, those among us seeking closure and clarity--or some degree of certainty--are probably not too thrilled. But, a reviewer reminds us that it is worth it to recall how the text makes a big deal out of Sumire and K's conversation about the difference between a Symbol and a Sign (28-29). It shows us how the way in which these two are distinquished is important for Murakami.
Sometimes his stories are like Signs (rarely) but more often they are like Symbols or are Metaphoric. A reviewer observes:
Signs and symbols are essential to a Murakami novel. Sometimes Murakami gives us an explanation that’s meant to be a sign: a scientist explains that certain events have changed a character’s neural pathways, and that’s why she’s a new person. Sometimes Murakami gives us a symbol...Occasionally, Murakami makes it very clear that something is to be a sign or a symbol, but far more often he leaves it vague. The essence of a Murakami novel is his exploitation of our uncertainty as to whether a story is a sign or a symbol.
The difference is essential. Often allegorical stories appeal more to our feelings because they ask us to project our own interpretations into them. Factual stories, on the other hand, are much more descriptive in nature. They are impermeable, good at providing information, but much less interpretable. By leaving us in doubt as to which is which, Murakami makes his books that much more interpretable. Not only do the allegorical elements invite our interpretation, but the very shape and structure of the plot itself.
http://quarterlyconversation.com/haruki-murakami-sputnik-sweetheart
If this reviewer is correct, it may help explain why Uncertainty is so prevalent in Sputnik Sweetheart and many other of Murakami works.
Of course, the point of all good fiction to cause us to think about ourselves and our lives. To reflect on what things mean. Perhaps to help us understand what we are doing here on this planet and how we can find or construct more meaning in our lives.
So, whether it's by means of Sign, Symbol, or Metaphor, the point is still to entice us into thinking about these questions. The result of our quests may only be more uncertainty. But at least we have tried and that process can help us in at least some way!
Can I claim to understand exactly what Murakami means by "this side" versus the "other side"?
Not really!
Some sort of "alternate reality," I presume. Another dimension of existence? Some place into which we must find our own way?
Or, we have to find a way to cross over to it.
Apparently half of Miu is over there.
And that is where all of Sumire went, K believes...but how come half of her didn't remain over here, on this side?
Maybe she didn't want to be an empty shell like Miu.
But, then, Miu was like that when she and Sumire first met.
And also, by the end of the novel, Miu is seemingly even more empty, and also, considerably worse off, if K's perception is accurate.
So, there is a lot of uncertainty here, a lot of stuff that we cannot understand in this novel, and probably that is exactly the way that author Murakami wants it. Especially if we think of him as a Postmodern writer, intent on interrogating--or perhaps deconstructing--our inherited notions of the individual self, of its stability and coherence, its continuity over time, and hence what we might call "the reality of the human experience."
There are 9 things on Jane Flax's list that Mary Klages discusses on her Postmodernism page, things that we used to believe in unequivocally:
(See http://www.willamette.edu/~rloftus/postmod.htm)
1. That there is such a thing as a stable, coherent, knowable self.
2. This self is conscious, rational, autonomous, and universal--no physical conditions or differences substantially affect how this self operates.
3. Moreover, this self is capable of knowing itself and the world.
4. It does this through the lens of reason, or rationality, which is posited as the highest form of mental functioning, and the only truly "objective" form.
5. We call this mode of knowing produced by the objective rational self "science," which, in turn, offers us universal truths about the world, regardless of the individual status of the knower. So it supposedly has a universality to it.
When you think about it, none of this should be surprising. Europeans emerged from the Dark Ages, started making tremendous new discoveries, and the foundations of the modern scientific method were developed and put into place. Science is considered a systematic and logical approach to discovering how things in the universe work. It is also the body of knowledge accumulated through the discoveries about all matter in the universe. The idea was to carefully observe nature and then seek rules or principles which can explain or predict its operation. Once empircal evidence was collected and analyzed, hypothoses could be developed and they were either proved or disproved.
At some point, scientific discoveries began to support practical applications in a variety of fields (technology!!) so that new labor-saving machines were created that greatly enhanced manufacturing capabilities. This, in turn, fed into the Industrial Revolution in England which eventually spread across the globe. No wonder it seemed for a few centuries that there were no limits to the human mind and that progress and development were unstoppable. But things do reach their limits and then the pendulum swings back the other way.
6. Therefore, the accompanying confidence that the knowledge/truth produced by science (by the rational objective knowing self) will always lead toward Progress and Perfection began to weaken in the minds of many philosophers and writers. In other words, the idea that all human institutions and practices can be perceived and analyzed by science (reason/objectivity) and therefore, improved upon, came under increasing scrutiny.
7. But Science had long stood as the paradigm for any and all socially useful forms of Knowledge. Science was thought to be always neutral and objective. But is it?
8. Scientists, the prevailing beliefs held, i.e., those who produce scientific knowledge through their unbiased rational capacities, must be free to follow the laws of reason, and not be motivated by other concerns (such as religion, money or power).
9. And, Language, or the mode of expression used in producing and disseminating all of this modern knowledge, must be rational also. But, to be rational, language must be transparent; it must function only to represent the real/perceivable world which the rational mind observes. There must be a firm connection between the objects of perception and the words used to name them (i.e., between signifier and signified).
But is language really transparent?
All the post-structuralist and post-modern critics highly doubt it! Many feel that language structures or "preconfigures" how we experience the world.
As Wikipedia summarizes it:
The common targets of postmodern critique include universalist notions of objective reality, morality, truth, human nature, reason, language, and social progress.
Postmodern thinkers frequently call attention to the contingent or socially-conditioned nature of knowledge claims and value systems, situating them as products of particular political, historical, or cultural discourses and hierarchies.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Postmodernism)
If knowledge is socially conditioned and the product of particular political and cultural discourses, then it is not the neutral, objective and unbiased entity that we long thought it to be.
What might that do to our prevailing worldviews? It certainly raises doubts and suspicions about what we know and how we know it.
Even in Japan, back in the early 1900s, a writer like Natsume Sôseki exhibited some serious reservations about western notions of individuality and the self as they were taking hold in Japan, especially if there weren't some natural restraints in place to buffer the impact of everyone acting on the basis of their own self-interests.
Unconstrained individualsim could breed selfishness, and individuals acting selfishly could produce chaotic conditions with disastrous consequences. Sensei placed his own needs above those of others, especially those of his best friend, K, and the consequences were devastatingly tragic.
But, in Sôseki we get no hint of anything like the "other side" where people live in a different, parallel world from "this world," the ordinary world which most of us inhabit.
So, does it seem that Murakami has continued to work with Sôseki's device of a love triangle, but has updated it? Instead of Sensei-K-Shizu it's now K-Sumire-Miu. In doing this, hasn't he pushed the envelope out and upped the ante, creating a kind of Kokoro revisited or Kokoro 2.0?
Here is a Sumire (or K) type of question:
By reading Kokoro and reflecting upon it, we might get some ideas about how we can better live our lives. Such as,
Let's not fail to be honest with those we care the most about.
Say what you mean, mean what you say, and don't hang your friends out to dry.
But how about with Sputnik? Are there corresponding lessons here?
Besides avoiding large Ferris Wheels in small Swiss towns, they may not be easy to see.
Unlike in Kokoro, there doesn't seem to be anything that K could have said or done differently to Sumire, or that Sumire could have said/done to Miu, that would have changed anything, or helped the situation out. Is there? It seems as though most everything was put out there on the table, so so speak.
So, does Sputnik have anything to teach us about how to behave better? How to be better human beings? Better teachers, friends or partners? About how we might improve ourselves, or clean up our act? Do we learn anything about avoiding pitfalls in life?
Maybe a little.
K does make some changes in his life, especially, with whom he chooses to sleep.
Also, Sputnik does seem to offer us a reminder about how precious some things in life are and how we need to treasure them, to love and savor them because they might not ever come around again. I get that.
But there seems to be little else of the cautionary tale present here. There is not much advice about how we should live our lives, how to avoid mistakes, or what the optimal ingredients are for a contented and satisfactory lifestyle.
So maybe Sputnik Sweetheart is just as dark as Kokoro. Or, possibly even darker! Some eight decades later, it does not seem that the human condition has improved very much.
But isn't there still something liberating about at least becoming more aware of something like this? Can't we benefit from learning something new, or learning how to perceive things differently? Because if we do not do that, how can anything ever change?
Let's look at what actually happens in the course of the second half of this novel.
Ch. 9
As they vacation in Greece, things are ideal for Miu and Sumire, and Sumire starts to write again.
One night, at 12:30 am, Miu wakes up to find that Sumire has collapsed in her room. Her body is rigid, she has been sweating, and she can’t communicate. "Her eyes were open but unseeing." (112) Feeling like she is "peering into someone else's secrets," Miu undresses her, and wipes her body down with a washcloth.
Sumire asks to sleep in Miu’s bed. She does not want to be alone and also she wants to touch and love Miu. Miu lies there unresisting but she has something she must tell Sumire.
Miu makes it clear that she has never had a homosexual experience, and has never considered having one. Heart and head might get aroused but not her body. No physical response. She tells Sumire that I am not rejecting you but I just can't do that kind of thing. Because of something that happened 14 years ago. (116-117)
Ah, hah!
We had already heard something about how Miu changed 14 years ago; that afterwards, her "self" was not the same as it had been. It was only half there!
Miu concludes that she and Sumire,
...were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. (117)
Sôseki has asked the question if two hearts can beat as one and while the answer was equivocal. Clearly it was not a solid YES! So, the evidence wasn't terribly encouraging. And now in Murakami's configuration, human beings are "no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits."
Ouch!
After crying her eyes out, Sumire goes back to her room by herself, never to be seen again.
That was four days ago.
Ch. 10
The Narrator, K, feels that the three of them are in something like an existential play (perhaps a reference to Sartre's famous existential play, No Exit): Miu cares for Sumire very much but can’t feel any sexual desire for her. Sumire loves Miu and desires her sexually. K loves Sumire and feels sexual desire for her...but it is completely unreciprocated. Sigh.
So they are all stuck?
Then there are the Two Documents in Sputnik. Do they resonate with or play a similar role to Sensei's Testament in Kokoro?
Let's have a look.
Ch. 11 DOCUMENT 1
K gets the idea to check out Sumire's Power Book at her "floppy discs" to see if she left a clue. It wasn't obvious, but going into her suitcase, and using the area code for Kunitachi, where "K" lives (0425), for the combination, he finds a small green diary with a floppy disk inside containing the Two Documents.
They are definitely in Sumire’s voice and her unmistakable style. She is chattering on as she loves to do.
She is driven to write. Why?
To find out what she thinks and who she is.
Isn't this very reminiscent of the Joan Didion quote I placed near the beginning of our Syllabus?
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
How does writing help Sumire understand things better? She throws out things like...Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings!
Precision: She will write about things as if she does not know them.
Confusion: Ah, but so many dualisms in the world. Theme and Style, Object and Subject.
What we know and what we Don't Know share the same space. Time to knock down some walls.
Walls: She hates walls and wants to break them down.
How can she do this?
By inhabiting her Dreams and learning how to live inside of them.
Her stance as a writer then, is to conceive her ideas in Dreams and then move from there into a deeper Understanding of reality. These Documents are not a novel so writing is just a form of thinking aloud.
She recounts her recent dream about her mother:
SUMIRE’S DREAM
She is seeking her mother who had died a long time ago. In her dream, Sumire believes her mother may have a critical piece of information to impart that Sumire needs in order to survive--even though she thinks her mother may hate her, too! It's a dream!
There is a long spiral staircase; near the top is a landing and a round hole. Her mom is on her way back to the other side; she is being sucked into the hole feet first. When she calls out to her mother, she only gets pulled in even deeper.
Then the spiral staircase transforms into a tower. Sumire sheds her hospital gown, is naked and something is buzzing around her like little airplanes that eventually turn into Dragonflies after Sumire sheds her hospital gown and is naked. It's almost reminiscent of the famous scene from the original King Kong movie when he straddles the Empire State Building and swats at the little bi-planes which are encircling and harassing him!
Sumire resolves to tell Miu how she feels. She wants to love Miu but fears rejection. If Miu rejects her, she will cross that bridge shen she comes to it.
Blood is going to have to be shed.
In a bit of foreshadowing, Sumire talks about her boomerang and how when it comes back but it’s not the same one she threw. (141)
Hmm...this seems to happen to other characters in Sputnik, too.
Ch. 12 DOCUMENT 2
TALE OF MIU AND THE FERRIS WHEEL
Sumire encourages, cajoles and bullies Miu into revealing her secret story [much like "I" did to Sensei]. "Every story has a time to be told," she convinces Miu. "Otherwise, you'll forever be a prisoner to the secret inside you." (143) It seems this was something of which Sensei was aware but he did realize that secrets do have their time to be revealed.
Miu's story went like this:
She was 25 and living in Paris when she went to Switzerland. There, she rented a furnished apartment. She met a handsome Latin type who seemed to be interested in her sexually. Ferdinando. But she begins to feel this man is stalking her; and she also feels looked down upon by the town in general because she is Asian.
Two weeks later goes to an amusement part to ride the giant Ferris Wheel even though it’s late, 10:30 pm or so.
The Ferris Wheel stops and Miu gets stranded and abandoned at the top of the wheel. The staff has seemingly gone home. Scary!
After midnight she wakes; it’s cold, she looks around to find her apartment: she peers in with binoculars and sees Ferdinando naked in her apartment...with her, doing things to her sexually. It was another "her" that she was seeing, and Miu became convinced that Ferdinando was trying to "pollute" her.
But later it didn’t even seem that it was Ferdinando. Ever.
But it didn't matter because Miu had become split into two halves, forever.
What Miu saw was grotesque and menacing like some medieval allegorical painting. Is someone showing her this, wanting her to see it?
She blanks out, her memories come to a halt. She wakes up in the hospital. She was injured, but how?
Her Hair has turned White; and she seems to be in shock.
So, another Miu, maybe half of her, is all that remains. Her other half has departed, left, gone to the other side.
She says,
“I was still on this side, here. But another me, maybe half of me, had gone over to the other side.” (157)
Remember? She had alluded to this fact to Sumire back in Ch. 4 on p. 47.
Her black hair, her periods, her ovulation, her sexual desire, maybe even her will to live had all left her. She is split into two forever.
Moreover, she doesn’t know which of her two selves is the real one. And she lacks the confidence to figure it out.
Once again, we encounter a classic statement of the Postmodern take on the dilemma of the modern self.
The self is not what we once thought it was: unified, knowable, stable, rational, autonomous, dependable, coherent, and universal, valid for all times and places.
Rather, the self is unstable and contingent upon all the social and networks in which it is situated. This is where identity is rooted, not in some essentialist notion of the individual self.
Miu was never able to play the piano again. She already suspected that she was lacking something, some kind of emotional depth, something that the other great pianists had.
Did she herself create this weird moment? Did she bring it on herself? That hardly sounds fair...but maybe she already knew something inside her was missing. [Remember how in Mieko's essay on "An Account of the Shrine in the Fields," she suggested Genji's own guilty conscience was somehow projecting onto the Rokujô Lady and causing her to attack and harm others?]
She had wondered about that...why other pianists with less technique and worse practice habits could move listeners more than she could. Is she lacking the depth of emotion necessary to inspire people? Earlier in the novel, Sumire had the same kinds of doubts about her fiction writing, too.
Miu speculates that growing up in the way she did, she felt emotionally Japanese but often like a foreigner. She treasured her independence and felt she just had to make herself stronger. So she developed an "unshakable" but "practical" outlook on life, but maybe she lacked human warmth.
Miu had lost her virginity at 17; had lots of sexual experiences with men, but never truly loved anyone. She just didn't have the time. She was dedicating herself to becoming a world class pianist. (159)
Miu tells Sumire that what she is seeing here today isn't the real Miu; she is "just a shadow of who I was," (a point she had made much earlier, back on p. 47) when they first met. Miu told Sumire, "The person here now isn't the real me. Fourteen years ago I became half the person I used to be."
So Miu’s story of her rupture is now splitting Sumire in two because she is in love with Miu: the Miu on this side but also the Miu on the other side, too. Either one, or both.
Who in the world am I? she wonders. (160-161) The same question plagued our narrator, K, too back in Ch. 5 where he referred to it as the old "Who Am I" paradox. (54)
This question is central to Postmodern theory. Postmodern writers feel that there isn't a single, clear-cut answer to the question “Who am I?”
This is because, according to Postmodern psychologists, there is no single, separate, unified self. Rather, we are made up of many selves. The way that we come to this multiplicity is through the collective influences of various social factors, including language, geography, family, education, government, etc.
Therefore, rather than having some static, inherent nature, we are all social constructs. Simply put, the self is a socially constructed entity.
Ch. 13 K is still in Greece
K reflects on the Two Documents. Both are definitely written by Sumire. It’s her voice, her unique, one-of-a-kind phrasing. Though she sounds more restrained, more distanced than usual.
Something drove her to write for the first time in a while. Is she getting her "Mojo" back? What gets her going? Does she believe that the Miu here on this side cannot love her but maybe the other half might?
K concludes that there must be a connection between Sumire’s dream and Miu’s split into two halves.
This side--the other side. That was the common thread. The movement from one side to the other. (164)
He can't buy the idea that Sumire would kill herself. So he puts a theory out there:
Sumire went over to the other side. That would explain a lot. Sumire broke through the mirror and journeyed to the other side. To meet the other Miu who was there. (166)
K's Conclusion:
We can exist in two different worlds and Sumire went over to the other side, perhaps to meet Miu's other half there. He recalls Sumire writing about entering the world of dreams in order to avoid a “collision.” Sumire had somehow found an exit, found the door, turned the knob, and slipped outside, from this side to the other side. (166)
K and the Strange Music Experience (168-172)
Then K has his own totally weird, "Fowelsian" experience on the mountain top when he awakens to the sound of music. He hears drums, bouzouki, accordion, and a flute, maybe a guitar. He wonders if Sumire might have heard the same music a few days earlier and had gone to check it out. He feels like he is in a dream. He becomes less and less certain that he actually heard the music he thought he did. "Maybe it had all been an illusion." (172)
Talk about "contigency" and "uncertainty!" And Miu, also, saw Ferdinando vioating her but then was not even sure it was him!
K is feeling alienated, even dissociated. His hands and legs are no longer feel like they are his own. He is affected even down to the cellular level, feeling as though his cells were all rearranging. Actually, as the text reads,
Someone had rearranged my cells, untied the threads of that held my mind together. I couldn't think straight. All I was able to do was retreat as fast as I could to my usual place of refuge. I took a huge breath, sinking in the sea of consciousness to the very bottom. Pushing aside the heavy water I plunged down quickly and grabbed a huge rock there with both arms. (170)
Remember, though, he went up a hilltop so this "sea" has to be metaphorical, the sea of his consciousness. "Meaning was fixed to the temporal, and the temporal was trying to force me to rise to the surface." (171) But he is clearly fighting, resisting.
So now, all three characters, Miu, Sumire, and K, have had one of these experiences where they come out feeling that they are radically changed, that they are not the same person that they were. Sounds like a strong case for the idea that a stable, unified self no longer exists. Or, at least, it is under siege! And K is trying to fight back.
He had sunk down into a sea of consciousness, down to the very bottom. Time reversed itself, collapsed and then reordered itself. And, to top things off, he's not even sure he ever did heqr any music, or even if there was any music.
K recalls:
...The moonlight warped every sound, washed away all meaning, threw every mind into chaos. It made Miu see a second self. It took Sumire's cat somewhere. It made Sumire disappear. And it brought me here, in the midst of music that--most likely--never existed. Before me lay a bottomless darkness; behind me, a world of pale light. I stood there on the top of a mountain in a foreign land, bathed in moonlight. Maybe this had all been meticulously planned from the very beginning. (170-172)
Oh, Really? Meticulously planned by someone? Remember how Miu wondered if what she saw from the Ferris Wheel had all been planned and arranged by somebody for her to see. But by whom? Weird!
He felt a strong sense of alienation. Then, the sky seemed to change, and the sense of alienation was gone.
Stars are now in the sky. Amd there is no music. Had there ever been any? He wonders if maybe the whole thing had been meticulously planned? By some mysterious outside agents?
The idea of somebody orchestrating all of this is spooky (not to mention totalitarian] but it is also very reminiscent of John Fowles' novel, The Magus, a work to which Murakami has alluded, albeit indirectly, when he set up Miu and Sumire's presence on this Greek island.
Remember? They were offered an Englishman's cottage, which was part of a British expatriate community that featured a number of aspiring novelists.
Among those novelists, Mr. Fowles is probably the most well-known. His best-known works include The Collector, The French Lieutennant's Woman, and The Magus--all novels with strange twists or a sense of altered reality to them. All actually made into popular films.
Especially The Magus in which a young British teacher takes a post at a boy's school on this Greek Island, but in his spare time, he hangs out at the mansion of a Mr. Conchis where strange, inexplicable things occur.
Neither the main character nor we as readers quite know what is real and what is not. For more on this connection, see here.
From there, it seems only a short step to including a scene like the one above in Sputnik where readers are not sure exactly what has transpired but the characters know that they have been changed. They know that their self--the very thing they thought was unitary and stable--is not the same self that it once was. It is fragmented and unstable!
K's self has seemingly rearranged itself all the way down to the cellular level. As he sinks down into a Sea of Consciousness, he fights to hold onto any sense of his individual identity which feels like it is being erased; and, along with it, any certainty he may have had about the self and the human experience. Everything is up for grabs.
K is not only unsure about what has happened to him; he's not even sure whether anything happened at all! Did he ever really hear any music?
He talked about being brought "here in the midst of music that--most likely--never existed."
The music never existed? Oh my! We are definitely inhabiting the world of uncertainties!
Ch. 14 Opens with the statement,
In the end we never found out what happened to Sumire. As Miu put it, she vanished like smoke. (173)
Murakami foreshadowed all of this nicely all the way back at the end of Ch. 1 when Sumire knew she was being caught up in this powerful current of her tornado-like love for Miu. She realizes that she has no choice but to go with the flow, "Even if it means I'll be burned up, gone forever." (25)
Is this what has happened to her?
K and Miu have an odd little "moment" when he departs. It starts as a standard goodbye hug but he feels a spark and it seems that her hand, rubbing his back, was trying to tell him something.
There was a connection between the two.
Miu wanted me, I believe, and, in a sense, I wanted her as well. She grabbed on to my heart with a rare intensity. (176)
But that wasn't all. Miu had even said, "I just want you to know that I like you. Very much." (175)
So, desire is palpable in this scene and both experienced it. But the moment between them passed and nothing happened even though the attraction, was clearly there. On both sides. If anything, Miu was the more assertive of the two. Later, K would muse "Maybe I should have stayed with Miu." (176)
Meanwhile, without Sumire, K feels incomparable loneliness, and the world seems drained of all its color. He recognizes how important, how irreplaceable Sumire was to him. She kept him tethered to the world.
As I talked to her and read her stories, my mind quietly expanded, and I could see things I never saw before... I loved Sumire more than anyone else and wanted her more than anything in the world. (177)
Despite its obvious limitations, what they had was very special. They exposed their hearts to each other like newlyweds undressing in front of each other. So rare, so precious, "an experience I'd never have with anyone else." (177) That is why now the world is cold, gloomy, empty without Sumire.
Each of us has something special, like a small flame.
A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it's gone forever. What I'd lost was not just Sumire. I'd lost that precious flame. (178)
I love that passage! Sumire was that precious flame that lit his pathway through the world, and now she is gone.
With an unplanned layover in Athens, K goes up to the Acropolis and thinks about everything. K wonders what life on the other side is like. Sumire is over there; so is part of Miu--the part with her black hair and her "healthy sexual appetite." (178)
Is there a place for him over there? He has no clue how he might get over there but, anyway, would that even work? Would their relationship "last forever?"
No, he concludes. It would not be "natural."
Tomorrow, he will be back in the stream of everyday life; but tomorrow he will also be a different person, "never again the person I was...something inside has burned up and vanished." (179)
Something inside K is gone, it’s made an exit. A door opens, something is gone, and the lights go out. K just won’t be there anymore.
"Someone else will occupy this body." (179)
So, has K been transformed, too? Like Miu and Sumire were? Lying on a slab of stone in the Acropolis, he wonders:
Why do people have to be so lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness? (179)
Hmm...I suppose Sôseki had once wondered that very same thing.
But K's musings continue:
... I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness of space, they meet, pass each other, and part never to meet again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep. (179)
Sheesh.
So, are we humans fated to be trapped in our orbits like lonely satellites in space? Bound to pass nearby to each other...but yet unable to truly connect, to unite, to merge, to become one with each other?
How does this outlook compare with the one we find at the end of Kokoro? Is it any sunnier?
It seems that humans are merely like "lonely metal souls" that "meet, pass each other and part never to meet again"? Are our chances for happiness about the same as a satellite's?
How has the human condition changed since 1914? Are our chances for happiness improved, do you think?
Ch. 15
Includes the the quite odd "Carrot" story. A strange part of an already narrative.
He's shoplifting: today, it's 8 staplers, worth 6,800-yen.
Before that, he stole 15 mechanical pencils (9,000-yen), and 8 compasses (8,000-yen). Is he just doing this for kicks? Is it a cry for help?
Carrot remains strangely emotionless through it all, eyes out of focus, just staring into the void. He says nothing. So is he a disengaged, somewhat strange...but possibly knowing child?
The Security Chief, a Mr. Nakamura, and K talk about jobs, careers, life—what accounts for their different perspectives?
Why does the Chief seem to be so annoyed? He says he always envied teachers (182-83). Why? They get lomng summer breaks and parents give them presents!
When K talks about "subtle emotional imbalances" in students, the Security Chief goes on a rant against modern education: see the bottom of p. 189ff.
"How can people all be equal?"
Who is going to clean up this shoplifting mess?
"People like me, that's who." (190) So, sounds like a whiny, frustrated person! Somebody else is getting more out of life than I am!
A popular song from the 1960s comes to mind, Bob Dylan's "Positively Fourth Street," inspired, perhaps, by people he knew when he was starting out, who tended to criticize him behind his back only to feign friendliness when their paths later crossed and he was a rising star. These are people who "just want to be on the side that's winning." But he understands that these former friends are deeply frustrated, harboring "heartbreaks":
No, I do not feel that good
When I see the heartbreaks you embrace
If I was a master thief
Perhaps I'd rob themAnd though I know you're dissatisfied
With your position and your place
Can't you understand
It's not my problem?
This is somewhat of a cold shot, to be sure, a reality check. But there is also compassion here. The singer is pointing out that the person with the issues, harboring all those "heartbreaks," is the one projecting his/her disappointment and anger onto others because, fundamentally, he cannot find the joy and happiness he desires out of life in his current "position or place." Right?
Mr. Nakamura is in his late 50s and in a small time job, barely making it. Probably not meeting the dreams or expectations he had as a younger man. And he's unahppy and resentful about it. Life didn't treat him right. The world is unfair. People like K with their cushy teaching jobs have it made!
What the singer is saying here, though, is, don't take your problems out on other people. The compassion comes in when he laments (and his voice softens at this moment in the song) that if he were a "master thief" who could "rob" the person of their heartbreaks, he would.
But, the sad news is, he cannot. That's not how it works. Moreover, it is not really his job to do that; it's not his "problem." But it's even more than that. These felings of disappointment, frustration and resentment are inside the other person. It's not something someone else can fix. It's up to that person to do it for him or herself.
There is an echo of this sentiment when, just before leaving with Carrot, K asks Mr. Nakamura "If people aren't equal, where would you fit in?" (190)
Ouch!
If you look at yourself honestly, where would you stand? If you are not happy, if you're not doing what you want with your life, is there nothing you can do to fix that? Because you're the only one who can....
Then, the key to storage room turns up missing.
K and Carrot walk home together. K opens his heart to Carrot about his losses, especially his friend who "disappeared on a small Greek island, and I went to search. But we didn't find anything. My friend just quietly vanished. Like smoke." (193)
This seems to get through to Carrot..."a glimmer of light appeared." So K builds on it:
My friend was the most important person in the world to me....Since I lost my friend, I don't have any more friends. Not a single one.(193)
He even mentions his dog who was hit by a car and killed. "[H]e was the only one I got along with...We understood each other." (194) But the lesson seems to be: "Human beings have to survive on their own." Very existentialist!
Carrot, who remains silent, hands K the storage room key.
Oh, hello!
"The boy's mind was a bigger enigma than I'd imagined." (196) Hmm...
They have a little moment, then K promptly drops the key into the river.
Hmm, again...Is there more than meets the eye to Carrot? Or to this scene?
K offers Carrot his hand and he puts his little hand in K's. They walk home together, hand-in-hand. A nice connection is made and this could be a difference maker.
Related to this moment, perhaps, K makes a decision and tells Carrot’s Mom that they should not see each other anymore. It's best for everybody, he says. By which he means that their affair is taking its toll on Carrot and has to stop.
But is it best for me, too, she wonders? What about her wants and needs? People used to talk to her. Now no one does. Not her husband, nor her children. So, is she destined to live the life of a lonely suburban housewife?
So, it's not a win-win. Did K do the right thing?
Maybe he only did what was necessary for him. He couldn’t think about everyone else, really; only Sumire. And she is no longer here. (199-201)
But perhaps the larger point in all this is that he did do something. He did the one thing that he could do.
His personal needs were negatively affecting a young person, one of his charges. He felt he had to do something about that. And anyway, it wasn't really fair to be with someone when--due to his feelings for Sumire--he couldn't be with her all the way.
Ch. 16
Carrot is no longer in K's homeroom but he seems better and he seems to have forgiven K. We can count this as a positive result.
K buys a copy of Elisabeth Schwarzkopf singing Mozart songs. Beautiful. He listens and remembers the island in Greece. Sumire would be 23 now.
In the middle of March, K had caught a glimpse of Miu in her midnight blue Jaguar. Her hair was white, and she had a stony cold look; not the same woman with whom he'd had that moment when they said goodbye back in Greece.
She is a different person now. She wears an icy hardened expression. Something has disappeared from her, too, leaving behind an empty shell, and the absence of life.
So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep or fatal the loss...we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence.(207)
K can't help himself, though, from picturing Sumire trying to call him...but the phone never rings.
Until, one day, it does.
Making the air of the real world tremble and shake.
It’s Sumire. He can scarcely believe it.
“Hey, I’m back,” she says.
She's calling from her same old, "totally semiotic telephone box." (209)
"A mold colored half moon hangs in the sky."
Ah. The world is just too semiotic.
And what do we mean by semiotic?
It refers to the study of signs and symbols and their interpretation. Obviously, Murakami is taken with Semiotics. Maybe he is even all over it!
Semiotics goes back the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and came into its own along with the "linguistic turn" of the 1970s and 1980s, which was turn focussing on language and what it can...and cannot do. Basically, this approach sees language, instead of "reality," as constitutive of social meaning and human consciousness.
Anyway, back to Sumire, she needs to see K; she has gone through bloody hell to get back here to see him. It feels like she must've shed some blood, somewhere, along the way, too.
"I really need you. You're a part of me. I'm a part of you. You know, somewhere--I'm not at all sure where--I think I cut something's throat." (209)
Symbolically, of course, like making that gate in ancient China.
Sumire is not sure where she is literally. She wants K to come get her. But she will need to get directions. She says she will call him right back; the phone connection is broken off and, after waiting for while in bed for Sumire to call back, K doesn’t stir.
And Sumire never calls back.
No need to rush, K is thinking; he is in no hurry. He is ready. He can go anywhere, anytime.
Right? Right you are!
So, is he taking on Sumire's voice?
He looks at the moon. It's the same moon Sumire described so they must be in the same world. All I have to do is draw it to me, K figures.
No blood on his hands so it must have seeped inside in its own silent way.
OK, wow.
So, Sumire is back from the other side…or is she? Is that even possible? Is she out there somewhere, in some (disembodied) form? Able to reach out to him without actually reaching him?
Why doesn’t K seem in a hurry to go pick her up? Does he know she is not really there….or anywhere?
Or, is the point that she had somehow managed to reach out to K from the "other side" and make contact because of their bond, their closeness? Even though they're closeness never had the romantic or physical component.
So, perhaps she reaches out to him in the only way she can, by means of her semiotic “phone.”
But not physically, not in person.
At least we don't think so.
There is always room for doubt. She describes the moon...and it is the same one K sees.
We're both loking at the same moon, in the same world. All I have to do is quietly draw it toward me.
No signs of any blood on his hands so...(210)
Uh, oh! What does that mean?
Are he and Sumire connected somehow? Are they experiencing the same reality from different venues or dimensions?
Or have they become one and the same person...but not really?
Is it possible for two people to be so well matched, and love each other in every way but physically?
K had gushed about how:
As I talked to her and read her stories, my mind quietly expanded and I could see things I'd never seen before. Without even trying, we grew close. Like a pair of young lovers undressing in front of each other, Sumire and I exposed our hearts to each other, an experience I'd never have with anyone else, anywhere. We cherished what we had together, though we never put it into words how precious it was. (177)
Their openness to each other and with each other was remarkable. Isn't this kind of openness the one thing that we never quite catch a glimpse of in Kokoro?
Sumire and K were like newlyweds undressing in front of each other...but not. Because that whole romantic and physical part of their relationship was missing .
They "cherished" each other, and what they had, but never quite managed to put into words how "precious" it was. So, was this failure to put it into words an opportunity lost? Despite all their amazing verbal sharing over the years, did they still come up short?
Are they like the other K and Sensei (and Shizu) -- incapable of saying what is in their hearts? Or was that simply a part of Meiji times? People were neither accustomed nor equipped to speak openly about matters of the Heart back in those days.
In Sputnik, it is hard to see how they could have changed anything between them just by articulating that which was pretty obvious to them both. And besides, they talked all the time about everything that mattered to them.
How could two people become any closer? As Sumire told him, "you're my one and only true friend." (178)
But is that enough? They were never going to be able to transform their relationship into one that exists between two lovers.
But, can they somehow remain a part of each other indefinitely? No one could talk and exchange ideas and feelings the way they did.
However, would this kind of relationship be enough to function as an antidote to the world'a loneliness?
How will that work for K over the long haul? K seems to acknowledge that "No matter how cleverly we might shelter it, our delicate friendship wasn't going to last forever." (177)
Since it does not seem as though Sumire will ever return to "this side," can he find happiness with someone else? Have a family? Become a father? Live a normal life?
Or is his best plan to forever try to find his way to Sumire on "the other side"?
But if that is the case, why wasn't he more eager to jump at the chance to go pick her up when she called? Is it because he knew that she could never really be there in physical form?
So where does that leave us?
Where can K go from here?
Is he at a similar crossroads to the narrator at the end of Kokoro in terms of his future?
He is more mature, he does have a job, a career, one that he appreciates and values. But if his world is dark, gloomy and lonely without Sumire, how well off will he be? Besides, something inside has left him. He is no longer the same person he was before he went to Greece.
We talked about the theory, the possibility, that "I" in Kokoro might eventually settle down and have a family. The text might be telling us that he did later have a child. Maybe even with Shizu, however unlikely that seems!
But what about K in Sputnik? Will he be able to do this with someone other than Sumire?
Socrates allegedly said at his trial that an "unexamined life is not worth living." If K and Sumire did anything consistently, it was to examine, reflect and talk about their lives. All the time! That was the very nature of their bond.
Is it possible that Murakami is interested in exploring what happens in a relationship when an intellectual and spiritual bond is established but it is not possible for there to be a romantic, a physical or sexual dimension to it as well?
One reviewer suggests that,
Murakami's fiction is full of characters whose mismatched erotic valences prevent them from coming together.
(https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/06/10/reviews/010610.10zaleskt.html)
OK, that sounds like what could be going on here.
Another reviewer observes:
Sputnik Sweetheart is a typical Murakami novel in that the narrator has matured in his understanding of sex and love, and this maturation has happened because he has created stories to explain events. Importantly, these stories have been informed and expanded by the stories—often surreal—of other characters he meets along the way. Taken as a whole, the stories are how the narrator understands himself....[Murakami's narrators] have gained the ability to understand signs and symbols, to use them to bridge the distances between consciousnesses (including their own), but they are mated with pain.
(https://www.harukimurakami.com/q_and_a/a-conversation-with-haruki-murakami-about-sputnik-sweetheart)
So pain is part of the price we have to pay for understanding? Like loneliness is the price we have to pay for being born into the modern world so full of selfish and egotistical individuals?
Yet another writer wonders about the mention of BLOOD in the final scene.
I spread my fingers apart and stare at the palms of both hands, looking for bloodstains. There aren’t any. No scent of blood, no stiffness. The blood must have already, in its own silent way, seeped inside. (210)
So, there is no trace of BLOOD to be found. It has somehow seeped inside.
In the novel, there is a lot of discussion about Sumire's need for more experience if she is to become a writer. And this idea about blood also seems to operate as a strong motif in the book.
So, do K and Sumire, then, bear some resemblance to the Chinese gates? Do they absorb the blood and/or the experience which helps them grow and mature together? And this, in turn, enables them to seek each other out for a relationship that centers around romantic companionship and not just sexual intercourse?
Have they somehow built a bridge that enables them to overcome the different realities that separate them? Is that why she can reach out to K at the end, and to seem to connect with him even though she is not physically present?
https://www.theodysseyonline.com/sputnik-sweetheart
Yet another way to think about all this is the idea that since Murakami in some way always seems to be talking about writing in his books, and how the process works for him--the answer may be in how we can use writing as a tool for examining ourselves, our souls.
We write to see what we think and feel and believe about things, right?
In Sputnik, it seems that if we want to understand ourselves, to read the signs and symbols, then it's going to hurt a bit. Maybe this pain is the proof we need that we are really alive.
Perhaps Murakami is all about the telling of stories and reflecting on what the nature of the process of creating and sharing our stories is. If so, he would certainly be in good company, and part of a long tradition going all the way back to Murasaki Shikibu. Right?
Monogatari 物語り: literally, the telling of things. Stories. Tales.
Obviously, Sumire and K's stories, their conversations, are how they have come to understand themselves and each other.
But, at bottom, Murakami seems to share at least some of Sôseki's reservations about the opportunities human beings have to really connect with one another and to free themselves from the limitations of being like "satellites" that are prison- like and must remain fixed in their individual orbits:
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. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing. (117)
Oh my goodness!
To be human is to be locked in prison cells from which communication is difficult at best? Is this all that Sumire and K--or Sumire and Miu--can hope for? To be imprisoned in their orbits, only being allowed to be together for a brief time, before passing on?
"Maybe," they can "even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing." (117)
That could be what happened to Sumire, and by extension, what happened to K and Sumire as well. However, this does not sound terribly optimistic, does it?
If we need a more optimistic spin, it is possible that Sumire can find some peace with Miu's other half on the other side; and that K can move on from Sumire but know that they will always be connected and that he may hear from her from time to time.
Perhaps this is the best we can hope for: a brief--albeit deep and meaningful--moment of contact with another human being, and then we are dropped back into a deep well of solitude until "we burn[...] up and become nothing."
Well, that is a tad dark.
Do you know the late Singer-Songwriter John Prine? He penned one well-known song called "Angel from Montgomery" (1971) the chorus for which goes:
Make me an Angel that flies from Montgomery,
Make me a poster of an old Rodeo,
Just give me one thing that I can hold on to
'Cause believing in this living is just a hard way to go.
Yes indeed, "Believing in this living" can be a hard way to go. For K that means accepting that his life has to move forward without his truest and dearest companion.
Is this what K is resigned to? Living his life in solitude without his beloved Sumire?
Sumire may be somewhere on the "other side" experiencing happiness with Miu's other half but she is also willing to struggle hard in order to return to "this side" just to say "Hi" to K. It must be a part of the bond they share--the bridges they built--but somehow she can never quite get to him in the fullest sense. She cannot seem to get to a place where she could actually see him, and talk to him.
Perhaps, appropriately, Murakami leaves us with more questions than answers. That may just be the way he wants it: the Murakami way.
Again, a reviewer:
Murakami so thoroughly embeds these metaphorical stories into each characters’ thoughts and actions that it’s impossible to tell which are real and which are not. All we can do is create interpretations of the novel that partition some stories as symbols and some as signs. This teasing ambiguity gives Murakami’s metaphors great depth while making them resistant to any one interpretation. They are like holograms, changing shape when viewed from different directions and impossible to grab hold of. This is Murakami’s genius. Although his prose is only so-so and is often riddled with clichés, it is the ideal material for Murakami to construct his elaborate plots. They are structures that shimmer and twist as we look at them, awe inspiring constructions that are strangely engrossing. Almost magically, they take on the complexity and uncertainty of real life.
http://quarterlyconversation.com/haruki-murakami-sputnik-sweetheart
Perhaps, in Murakami novels, we, the readers are "the other side," and in his fictional world, he wants to create
human characters that are free and human [and these] can only be created when their stories have that magical something that establishes empathy between the reader and the book. We the readers are “the other side” that a novel’s magical baptism links it to. There are many ways an author can establish this link, but Murakami does it with his metaphors. The shifting, shimmering qualities that make his metaphors so unique are also what give them that extra something that makes his characters come across as so real and makes his stories feel so personal. They suck our minds into Murakami’s novels, forcing us to project our thoughts and feelings into the characters.
http://quarterlyconversation.com/haruki-murakami-sputnik-sweetheart
And isn't this exactly the way that postmodern novels are supposed to operate? Pushing us, challenging us, tantalizing us, disorienting us, and bewildering us?
But hopefully engaging and teaching us, too.
Sure, Sputnik Sweetheart is breezy, casual, easy to read. But the best fiction does ask us to think about things, to reflect on ourselves and our lives. On the world we live in and if it is possible to make it a better place. Good fiction might shake us up, rattle some of our assumptions or preconceptions about what life should be.
Fiction allows us to experience vicariously things we might otherwise never get to. Thankfully! And we might come out of our reading experience a little differently from when we went in. But this is not a bad thing! So we should thank the great writers of the world for helping us along our journey.
***
Final Jeopardy Question:
1. Do you think Sumire "came back" from the "other side" and called K from her "totally semiotic telephone box"?
Note: Semiotics is the study of Signs, Symbols, and Signification; therefore, it is the study of how meaning is created. A reviewer of Murakami's work reminds us that early on in Sputnik, there is Sumire and K's conversation about the difference between a Symbol and a Sign (28-29). The conversation's appearence suggests that this distinction is important for Murakami.
Let's refer to the Handout.
The Frontside is a Statement. Basically, stuff we have seen, but let's Read it.
Then, there is a Question on the back side.
Is it possible that “[W]e the readers are [meant to be] ‘the other side’ [to which] a novel’s magical baptism links [us]?
What do you think?
Is that how the magic of imaginative fiction works?
Are we as Readers necessary as intermediaries or Stand Ins for "the Other Side" in order to make meaning happen?
Is Sputnik a variety of Magical Realism we are seeing here?
Let's return to our Question:
Do you think Sumire "came back" from the "other side" and called K from her "totally semiotic telephone box"?
Yes or No?
If No, then what do you think happens in Ch. 16?
[As noted in our last class, after the phone cuts off, the narrator shifts to the present tense for the final 3 paragraphs. Does that "signify" something?]
As far as wondering about what has become of Sumire, I point you to the passage where K, after reading through her two Documents twice, ponders what might have happened to Sumire.
He says
What was she trying to convey? Was she hinting that she might kill herself? I couldn’t buy that. Her words didn’t have the acrid smell of death. What I sensed in them was rather the will to move forward, the struggle to make a new start.” (165) (emphasis mine!)
So, in K's mind, Sumire is not she is not giving up. She is not ending things. Far from it.
She is beginning new things.
This must refer to her journey to the other side to find Miu’s other half!
It takes great courage and desire to move forward. Sumire is on to something. She is writing again.
Has she reclaimed some of her old magic?
K reminds us about this "magic" in the continuation of the quote above:
Dogs and blood are just metaphors…they get their meaning from magical life giving forces. The story about the Chinese gates was a metaphor of how a story captures that magic. (165)
Metaphors, of course. Are not literal. But they suggest the way things might be alike. Or different.
What do you think?
I don’t think we have to be afraid about feeling uncertain about things. There are numerous critics who believe that this is right where Murakami wants to take his readers.
We might as well then ask the follow up Question:
2. What do you think lies ahead for K? What might he do with the rest of his life?
Side Note and further question:
Just because all the uncertainty we experience makes Murakami's work unstable and open to multiple interpretations, does that mean ANYTHING is possible here?
3. Or, in fact, does Textual Evidence still count for something and limit the range of our interpretive possibilites?
Consider, for example, the question of Sumire's disappearence. Even if multiple interpretations are possible, there is still quite a bit of textual evidence to suggest that
a) Sumire is not dead, at least in the ordinary sense; and that
b) neither K nor Miu “feel” that Sumire is dead. They sense her presence still--somewhere in the multiverse.
K is quite explicit on this point as we saw in the quote above:
He senses in her words the expression of a will to move forward, to engage in the struggle to make a new start, to create a new beginning.
This is a far cry from the Sensei option.
So, yep, you guessed it. I'm going to say Yes to the question about Textual Evidence, though, admittedly, textual evidence itself can be subject to debate and interpretation.
But if a case can be made that K is still on "this side"--since he is clearly NOT on "the other side" with Sumire and half of Miu--then wouldn't we want to think about what he might do in the future...even though we cannot know for sure?