C.E.J. Simons

Haruki Murakami
Sputnik Sweetheart
Vintage, 2002
229 pages

BBC News recently reported that Laika the dog, sole passenger on Sputnik II, died within hours of the spacecraft’s launch in 1957, and not, as the Soviets claimed at the time, a week later. This revelation adds poignancy to the epigraph to Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, which recounts that ‘Laika became the first living being to leave the Earth’s atmosphere’. And in the end, it reinforces the main themes of Sputnik Sweetheart: the inevitable loneliness of all life and the impossibility of progress without sacrifice.

This fine, sparse novel—closer in form to Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase (1989) than the complex historicizing of his The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (1997)—delivers what Murakami’s readers have come to expect: a reticent male protagonist, several unusual women, and a bewildering mystery. Deceptively lucid prose, memorable imagery, and sudden bursts of eroticism propel the reader toward a climax that critics might call metaphysical or surreal—though Murakami prefers the term ‘weird’.

K, the protagonist and narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart, resembles some of Murakami’s other characters as well as Murakami himself. ‘I haven’t belonged to any company or any system,’ Murakami once said. ‘It isn’t easy to live like this in Japan.’ K possesses the outsider’s gift for self-effacement; he does not even introduce himself until a quarter of the way through the book, and even then he reveals only an initial, which he shares with the protagonist of Kafka’s The Trial.

The novel opens with a simple love triangle. K falls in love with his close friend Sumire, an unkempt, young writer. Sumire, in turn, makes the unruffled decision that she is a lesbian and proceeds to fall in love with an older woman, the mysterious Miu. Miu transforms Sumire from scruffy nocturnal animal into attractive executive assistant, persuading Sumire to give up writing to travel with her on business. Then Sumire vanishes, and with that twist, the story enters Murakami territory—much like David Lynch territory, but with less velvet.

But Sputnik Sweetheart is also a novel about the sacrifices of writing, something of a first for Murakami. Miu badgers Sumire, ‘At this stage in your life I don’t think you’re going to write anything worthwhile’. Sumire nicknames Miu ‘Sputnik Sweetheart’ after Miu confuses the satellite with a literary movement: ‘Beatnik—Sputnik. I never can remember those kinds of terms’. And in contrast to the motif of the lonely satellite with its doomed canine passenger, Murakami compares writing to an ancient Chinese gate, sanctified with a sprinkling of fresh dog’s blood: ‘Writing novels is much the same. You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living, breathing novel. A story is not something of this world’.

Murakami’s language is spot-on, and it sparkles more than ever in Sputnik Sweetheart. His favourite device, the metaphysical conceit, recurs effectively throughout. Woken in the dark, K tries to read his fluorescent clock ‘like an old lady struggling, unsuccessfully, to thread a needle’. Miu is ‘super-strict about food. Like some Spartan holed up in a mountain fortress’. And K describes one beautiful beach in Greece by writing, ‘It made me imagine a certain way of dying’.

Murakami, an outsider himself, writes his novels for outsiders—members of society for whom structured, linear time and normal causality mean little. Those who expect his stories to progress from question to straightforward answer will be disappointed. But those who suspect that the most nondescript, seemingly irrelevant members of society may in fact harbour its most incredible tales will take pleasure in Sputnik Sweetheart. For all the outsiders, flying like Sputnik through ‘the infinite loneliness of space’, Murakami’s novel is, if not a guiding star, at least a comforting companion.

C.E.J. Simons is a doctoral candidate and senior scholar in English Literature at Lincoln College, Oxford. He holds degrees from Harvard and Toronto, and has studied Far Eastern languages and culture since 1995.

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