Murakami Brings the Hidden to Light
'Sputnik' Fueled by Thwarted Desire
Reviewed by Francie Lin
Sunday, April 29, 2001
Sputnik Sweetheart
By Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
KNOPF; 210 PAGES; $23
Since the 1990's English translation of "A Wild Sheep
Chase," the best-selling Japanese author Haruki
Murakami has steadily published a number of
highly literary fantasies ranging from the
sentimental to the wildly bizarre.
His most well-known work in translation is "The
Wind-Up Bird Chronicle," a vast, labyrinthine
novel encompassing everything from a failing
marriage to a secret Japanese campaign in
Manchuria during World War II. In Japan, however,
the book that catapulted him to fame was the
short, piercing romance "Norwegian Wood."
Despite the wide range of plot and content, all of
Murakami's works share a kind of trademark
melancholy, a distinctive sorrow that is oddly
hypnotic, and his latest novel, "Sputnik
Sweetheart," is no exception. The book begins by
subverting almost immediately any expectation
of happy endings, or any real endings at all:
"In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire
fell in love for the first time in her life. An
intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across
the plains -- flattening everything in its path. . . .
The person she fell in love with happened to be
seventeen years older than Sumire. And was
married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is
where it all began, and where it all wound up.
Almost."
"Almost" is the undertone of the rest of the novel,
for "Sputnik Sweetheart" is nothing if not a study
of the unfulfilled. The two main characters,
Sumire and the narrator, a young man also in his
early 20s, are both in love with people incapable
of loving them in the way they want to be loved,
and the weight and sadness of the story centers
on the question of how desire survives without
release. The narrator, in love with Sumire, merely
restrains himself and endures with a combination
of compromise and clinical pragmatism, sleeping
with other women "to eliminate any sexual
tension between Sumire and me."
Sumire, by contrast, allows herself to be swept
away without worrying about the consequences of
passion. A budding novelist, she stops writing in
order to work for Miu, and the two of them travel
together to Europe on business trips, to a Greek
island for vacation, Sumire all the while waiting
for an opportunity to tell Miu how she feels. She
writes letters to the narrator from the island:
"The two of us lying on the pure white beaches of
the Aegean, two beautiful sets of breasts pointed
toward the sun, sipping wine with a scent of pine
resin in it, just watching the clouds drift by.
Doesn't that sound wonderful?"
After reading the letter, the narrator goes for a
swim in the public pool, comes home, irons his
shirts, drinks cheap wine. As happens so often in
this book, the small contrasts between Sumire
and the narrator are the focal points of the most
intense pain, and underscore the distance
between them with as much impact as any of the
more dramatic events. The narrator often
describes Sumire as if watching her from a
distant shore, so that later, when Sumire goes
missing, her physical absence seems to be
concrete evidence of his loneliness.
Alienation takes on different configurations as
the novel spins itself out. Most of the book deals
with the frustration of being isolated from
others. "Why do people have to be this lonely?"
the narrator asks toward the end of his story.
"What's the point of it all? . . . I turned faceup on
the slab of stone, gazed at the sky, and thought
about all the man-made satellites spinning
around the earth." The title is a reference to
Sputnik II, the Russian satellite launched in the
'50s with a dog named Laika aboard. (The satellite
was never recovered, and presumably Laika is
still orbiting alone in space.)
But if love and loneliness were its only concerns,
"Sputnik Sweetheart" would be simply a romantic
tragedy, poignant but limited. Murakami, however,
has a deep interest in the alienation of self,
which lifts the novel into both fantasy and
philosophy. "The person here now isn't the real
me," Miu tells Sumire early on in their
relationship. "Fourteen years ago I became half
the person I used to be."
What sounds like a mere expression turns out to
be literally true. The moment of true horror in
"Sputnik Sweetheart" occurs in Miu's history,
when as a young woman visiting Switzerland, she
finds herself trapped and forgotten at the top of a
Ferris wheel. Her hotel room is visible from her
car, and as she peers through the window she
sees herself having sex with a man who has been
stalking her. The shock of it knocks her out, but
when she finally recovers her senses, she is no
longer the same person she was.
For all its strange and touching beauty, "Sputnik
Sweetheart" is not the best of Murakami's novels.
Its flaws have mostly to do with the protracted
end, which offers a single instance of hope and
communication. Against the novel's darker canvas
of abandonment and loneliness, it seems too
quick, too easily destroyed.
But when the narrator philosophically returns to
his meditations on loss, it becomes a testament
to Murakami's great power: He compels us to
examine an emptiness we would rather forget.
Francie Lin is the associate editor of the
Threepenny Review.