“Sputnik Sweetheart” ~ Haruki Murakami

“Sputnik Sweetheart” ~ Haruki Murakami

Vintage Books; 2002; 240 pp

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(1) “Sputnik Sweetheart” finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping ‘Wind-up Bird Chronicle’, less playfully bizarre than ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’, the author’s seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. “There was nothing solid we could depend on,” the reader is told. “We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another.”

The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer’s block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears “like smoke.” The school teacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire’s lover.

“Sputnik Sweetheart” is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing - where doppelgangers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing.

(2) Murakami’s seventh novel to be translated into English is a short, enigmatic chronicle of unrequited desire, involving three acquaintances - the narrator, a 24-year-old Tokyo school-teacher; his friend Sumire, an erratic, dreamy writer who idolizes Jack Kerouac; and Miu, a beautiful married businesswoman with a secret in her past so harrowing it has turned her hair snowy white. When Sumire abandons her writing for life as an assistant to Miu and later disappears while the two are vacationing on a Greek island, the narrator/ teacher travels across the world to help find her. Once on the island, he discovers Sumire has written two stories: One explaining the extent of her longing for Miu; the second revealing the secret from Miu’s past that bleached her hair and prevents her from getting close to anyone. All of the characters suffer from bouts of existential despair, and in the end, back in Tokyo, having lost both of his potential saviours and deciding to end a loveless affair with a student’s mother, the narrator laments his loneliness. Though the story is almost stark in its simplicity more like Murakami’s romantic ‘Norwegian Wood’, than his surreal ‘Wind-Up Bird Chronicles’, the careful intimacy of the protagonists’ conversation and their tightly controlled passion for each other make this book worthwhile. Like a Zen Koan, Murakami’s tale of the search for human connection asks only questions, offers no answers and must be meditated upon to provide meaning.