Murakami - Sputnik Sweetheart

Sumire is an aspiring writer who survives on a family stipend and the creative input of her only friend, the novel's male narrator and protagonist, known in the text only as 'K'. K is an elementary school teacher, 25 years old, and in love with Sumire, though she does not quite share his feelings. At a wedding, Sumire meets an ethnic Korean woman, Miu, who is 17 years her senior. The two strike up a conversation and Sumire finds herself attracted to the older woman. This is the first time she has ever been sexually drawn to anybody. Miu soon asks Sumire to come work for her. This meeting and the ensuing relationship between the women leads to Sumire changing: she starts wearing nicer clothes, gets a better apartment, and quits smoking; however, she also develops writer's block.

K suddenly begins to receive letters from Europe written by Sumire. With them, he is able to track Sumire's and Miu's business travels across the continent. In her last letter, Sumire mentions that instead of coming home as originally planned, she and Miu are to spend some extra time on a Greek island vacationing.

After a short while, K begins to call Sumire's house wondering when she will return. The only answer he gets, however, is from her answering machine. He soon gets a surprising call from Miu, who asks him to fly to Greece and mentions that something has happened to Sumire. He meets Miu for the first time, and she tells him that Sumire has vanished without a trace. She tells him about the string of events that led to the point of Sumire's disappearance, in which Miu was unable to reciprocate physically when Sumire initiated a sexual encounter. Miu is very pleased to have K around, but worries that Sumire may have committed suicide; K reassures her that Sumire would not do that.

Miu leaves the island for Athens in order to get help from the Japanese embassy and to call Sumire's parents. K spends a day on the island thinking about Sumire and her fate, coming to a realization that there might be some clue in Sumire's writing that Miu mentioned. He finds Sumire's computer and a floppy disk that contains two documents, named simply "Document 1" and "Document 2". One contains Sumire's writing about a dream of hers in which she tries and fails to reach a version of her mother, who died when Sumire was young. The other is a story that Miu told her about an event that transformed her 14 years ago. She was trapped in a Ferris wheel overnight and, using her binoculars to see inside her nearby apartment, witnessed another version of herself having a disturbing sexual encounter with a man. The event caused her hair to turn completely white and divested her of sexual urges. Miu says that she feels that she was split in two on that night, and has lost that other part of herself forever. Trying hard to connect the dots, K concludes that both the stories suggest the existence of multiple worlds, and Sumire has left this world and entered a parallel one, perhaps to be with the other version of Miu. He then has a mystical experience during the night.

Miu returns after a couple of days. K feels his time there is up, even though he feels a connection to Miu. Going back to Japan, he returns to his everyday life. In Sumire's absence, however, he feels he has lost the only precious thing in his life.

He continues with his solitary life. Despite their promises to the contrary, he never sees Miu again except for one chance encounter: Miu drives past him in her Jaguar but doesn't seem to acknowledge he is there. She has stopped dyeing her hair, and it is now pure white. K senses she is now an "empty shell," lacking what both Sumire and K were once drawn to about her.

Without warning, K receives a phone call from Sumire, who tells him that she is in the same phone booth near her apartment that she had always called him from. She asks him to come to get her from the phone booth.

Intro

Just like its ending, where one protagonist reappears with hope, and the other becomes a hollow person with no awareness of her existence, Sputnik Sweetheart presents the reader with a bittersweet reading experience. Greek island, scorching heat, young Asians discussing The Beats generation... Everything feels very Haruki Murakami-esque, light, artistic, and even pretentious, as always. However, in Sputnik Sweetheart, Murakami follows a similar trope as in Norwegian Wood and isn’t satisfied with simply telling a pure love story; instead, he incorporates elements related to death and sexuality, leaving some of these young people feeling lost, while others find solace. Hence, the reader embarks on a journey of an unconventional love story – we cannot simply hope for the confessions or reunion between the characters with ease, but rather, we become entangled in elements of mystery that emerged out of nowhere: bloodstains, rape, theft. At this moment, readers transition from mere observers of relationships to detectives attempting to piece together the truth.

‘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.’ - K, the protagonist

One of the most puzzling parts of Sputnik Sweetheart is the fragments of Sumire’s novel she left on her computer. Although Sumire is pictured as a very likeable protagonist in Sputnik Sweetheart,  her writing is of an odd tone (which at the end seems reasonable to me) that makes her message very hard to decipher, which is a reason why some readers have to put the book down. However, looking in retrospect, her writing, especially the ominous,  humorous, and occasionally violent tone of it, is fundamental to conveying the overall message of Sputnik Sweetheart.

The phrase "Right? Right you are!" sounds in particular offensive and ominous. And it is this ominous feeling, the feeling that we are all doomed because we are inevitably alone in this world, something that Murakami aims to convey.

I 'cut something's throat' …  'sharpening my knife'....'my heart a stone'. - Sumire’s writing

In the first half of Sputnik Sweetheart, Murakami depicts a very accurate image of innocence. Sumire and the male protagonist K are innocent young people who have their own problems: a family that does not seem to care much about them, an affair, too much or too little sexual desire...but these problems do not impede their motivation to engage in things that they are interested in – reading and writing. True, they have already experienced loneliness at this stage, but they still found some resonance with music, books, and each other.

As soon as Sumire falls in love with Miu, who is a more mature woman with a Korean background, the age of innocence has ended. Sumire and K are tossed into the sea of reality like two plastic bags. It could be said that Sumire's journey with Miu to a Greek island was hopeful and pure in the beginning, but as soon as Sumire recognizes her own sexual desire, they can never return to who they were at the beginning. When all three characters, Sumire, Miu and K are present in the real world, they experience violence. Miu experienced violence in the Ferris wheel. Although her traumatic experience could take place in a surreal context, I would interpret it as a metaphor for Miu being actually raped, with her distorted memory being a coping mechanism. Sumire experienced violence in her dream. K experiences no explicit form of violence, but the nonchalance of his family and the fact that his own desire for Sumire can never be fulfilled is also a form of violence.

In one section, K heard a form of abnormally enticing music from far away and climbed up a hill in Greece in pursuit of the source of the music. During the climb, he felt that his body was almost mutilated, and he had to dive into the water to get himself together. Speaking from personal interpretation, this would be a metaphor for suicide, which is exactly what Sumire is trying to do when she disappears. When innocence is lost and reality unmasks itself, the characters in the story are unable to navigate themselves and have no choice but to commit suicide to retain at least part of their true self.

Obviously, none of them committed suicide. They made attempts, but they weren't successful. The severe amount of effort Sumire made to come back that she mentioned on the last phone call can thus be interpreted in two senses: 1) she actually entered a fantastical world (presumably following the guidance of music) 2) she tried hard to recover from mental illness or failed suicidal attempt (she could be in a ward or in her own place where she could have no contact with other people).  In the end, Sumire calls the protagonist, everything seems to return to its original place,  but the reader knows that everything has changed. But "we continue to play our lives this way, in silence."

Some interesting parallels with Norwegian Wood and Kafka on the Shore:

• Miu seems to resemble the girl the male protagonist eventually slept with at the end of Norwegian Wood (in Sputnik Sweetheart, although Miu did not have sex with the protagonist, they did feel a certain attraction toward each other).

• Music is a recurring theme in both novels. It also gives a glimpse of hope, as music can always be something that consoles us when we experience violence in the real world. On the other hand, under Murakami's pen, music is more powerful than therapeutic. In Sputnik Sweetheart, music can also be something that lures people into suicide or whatever darkness it is. In Kafka on the Shore, music is something that is so beautiful yet so dangerous that even attracts the character Oshima to crash his car and die in this exquisite moment.

Overall, although Sputnik Sweetheart is obscure in some aspects, it is definitely not a weak work of Murakami. In fact, the implicit approach Murakami took to explore themes including loneliness and mental illness is far better than what he did in Norwegian Wood (with that being said, I still prefer Norwegian Wood because the characters are much better built). I particularly like the first few sections where Murakami described how K enjoyed his time alone: cooking stuff, reading stuff, listening to things... it seems like a life introverts would enjoy over the summer holiday. When K lost his connection to the world (Sumire), loneliness became a true and painful one: isolation, which is something no one expects themselves to endure, yet we all somehow manage to endure it.

"But all I felt was an incomparable loneliness. Before I knew it, the world around me was drained of color. From the shabby mountaintop, the ruins of those empty feelings, I could see my own life stretching out into the future. It looked just like an illustration in a science fiction novel I read as a child: the desolate surface of a deserted planet. No sign of life at all. Each day seemed to last forever, the air either boiling hot or freezing. The spaceship that brought me there had disappeared, and I was struck. I’d have to survive on my own." - K, the protagonist