“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.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / AFTER DARK

HARUKI MURAKAMI / AFTER DARK

Translated from the Japanese by: Jay Rubin; Harvill Secker Publishers;
2007; 210 pp

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Haruki Murakami’s After Dark takes place over the course of seven hours during an autumn night in Tokyo. From midnight to dawn we follow five lost souls: a woman in a quasi-comatose state; a jazz musician at an all-night practice session; a prostitute assaulted at a “love hotel”; a salary man working late on a software project; and a 19-year-old girl looking to escape from the tension of her strained home life. Before the sun rises, each of these stories will intersect with the others.

Murakami has long been admired for his depiction of the isolation and loneliness of modern Japanese life. Some have lauded him as the J.D. Salinger of Japan. Murakami has even translated The Catcher in the Rye into Japanese, and his breakthrough novel Norwegian Wood captured some of the spirit of that coming-of-age classic. Norwegian Wood sold four million copies, and struck a resonant chord with a younger generation of Japanese readers. After Dark focuses on a similar theme of Japanese youth struggling to reconcile their ideals with the stultifying conformity of the surrounding culture.

Murakami focuses, in his words, on “the secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light,” a time when “no one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.” Much of the power of his stories comes from the paradoxical quality of their settings, which at one moment seem intensely realistic, but the next instant have veered off into a mysterious alternative universe.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / NORWEGIAN WOOD

HARUKI MURAKAMI / NORWEGIAN WOOD

Download Link

In a complete stylistic departure from his mysterious and surreal novels (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; A Wild Sheep Chase) that show the influences of Salinger, Fitzgerald and Tom Robbins, Murakami tells a bittersweet coming-of-age story, reminiscent of J.R. Salamanca's classic 1964 novel, Lilith, the tale of a young man's involvement with a schizophrenic girl. A successful, 37-year-old businessman, Toru Watanabe, hears a version of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, and the music transports him back 18 years to his college days. His best friend, Kizuki, inexplicably commits suicide, after which Toru becomes first enamored, then involved with Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko. But Naoko is a very troubled young woman; her brilliant older sister has also committed suicide, and though sweet and desperate for happiness, she often becomes untethered. She eventually enters a convalescent home for disturbed people, and when Toru visits her, he meets her roommate, an older musician named Reiko, who's had a long history of mental instability. The three become fast friends. Toru makes a commitment to Naoko, but back at college he encounters Midori, a vibrant, outgoing young woman. As he falls in love with her, Toru realizes he cannot continue his relationship with Naoko, whose sanity is fast deteriorating. Though the solution to his problem comes too easily, Murakami tells a subtle, charming, profound and very sexy story of young love bound for tragedy. Published in Japan in 1987, this novel proved a wild success there, selling four million copies.

“Sputnik Sweetheart” ~ Haruki Murakami

“Sputnik Sweetheart” ~ Haruki Murakami

Vintage Books; 2002; 240 pp

Download Link

(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.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / NORWEGIAN WOOD

HARUKI MURAKAMI / NORWEGIAN WOOD

Download Link

In a complete stylistic departure from his mysterious and surreal novels (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle; A Wild Sheep Chase) that show the influences of Salinger, Fitzgerald and Tom Robbins, Murakami tells a bittersweet coming-of-age story, reminiscent of J.R. Salamanca's classic 1964 novel, Lilith, the tale of a young man's involvement with a schizophrenic girl. A successful, 37-year-old businessman, Toru Watanabe, hears a version of the Beatles' Norwegian Wood, and the music transports him back 18 years to his college days. His best friend, Kizuki, inexplicably commits suicide, after which Toru becomes first enamored, then involved with Kizuki's girlfriend, Naoko. But Naoko is a very troubled young woman; her brilliant older sister has also committed suicide, and though sweet and desperate for happiness, she often becomes untethered. She eventually enters a convalescent home for disturbed people, and when Toru visits her, he meets her roommate, an older musician named Reiko, who's had a long history of mental instability. The three become fast friends. Toru makes a commitment to Naoko, but back at college he encounters Midori, a vibrant, outgoing young woman. As he falls in love with her, Toru realizes he cannot continue his relationship with Naoko, whose sanity is fast deteriorating. Though the solution to his problem comes too easily, Murakami tells a subtle, charming, profound and very sexy story of young love bound for tragedy. Published in Japan in 1987, this novel proved a wild success there, selling four million copies.

HARUKI MURAKAMI / AFTER DARK

HARUKI MURAKAMI / AFTER DARK

Translated from the Japanese by: Jay Rubin; Harvill Secker Publishers;
2007; 210 pp

Download Link

Haruki Murakami’s After Dark takes place over the course of seven hours during an autumn night in Tokyo. From midnight to dawn we follow five lost souls: a woman in a quasi-comatose state; a jazz musician at an all-night practice session; a prostitute assaulted at a “love hotel”; a salary man working late on a software project; and a 19-year-old girl looking to escape from the tension of her strained home life. Before the sun rises, each of these stories will intersect with the others.

Murakami has long been admired for his depiction of the isolation and loneliness of modern Japanese life. Some have lauded him as the J.D. Salinger of Japan. Murakami has even translated The Catcher in the Rye into Japanese, and his breakthrough novel Norwegian Wood captured some of the spirit of that coming-of-age classic. Norwegian Wood sold four million copies, and struck a resonant chord with a younger generation of Japanese readers. After Dark focuses on a similar theme of Japanese youth struggling to reconcile their ideals with the stultifying conformity of the surrounding culture.

Murakami focuses, in his words, on “the secret entries into darkness in the interval between midnight and the time the sky grows light,” a time when “no one can predict when or where such abysses will swallow people, or when or where they will spit them out.” Much of the power of his stories comes from the paradoxical quality of their settings, which at one moment seem intensely realistic, but the next instant have veered off into a mysterious alternative universe.