Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (Goodreads // Amazon )

I read Sputnik Sweetheart for my current humanities class, and I loved it. Two-hundred pages of beautiful writing and a gripping storyline, with interesting and multi-dimensional characters who are relatable in the most unexpected ways.   

Sputnik Sweetheart is the story of K, Sumire, and Miu. K is the narrator and Sumire's best friend (he's also in love with her). Sumire herself is in love with Miu. They each have a tangled and unrequited bond with one another, and their paths all intersect on a Greek island where Sumire disappears.

Let me start with the narrator – K. K is my favorite character in the book. He is equal parts mysterious and ambiguous. He is real, raw – but not irritating and overdone. He is humorous in a tasteful way, he is contemplative and introspective. He manages to deliver a comprehensive story, as though he’s not relating events from a first-person perspective, but rather as an omniscient narrator. He makes the other characters speak and rarely uses direct quotations, creating an illusion for his knowledge of other characters’ thoughts and emotions. 

And yet – we don’t know. We don’t know if he’s making some things up, or if some things are genuine and he’s just not relaying it in the typical way we expect him to. And to further our doubt, he tells us this. He tells us that he can’t know everything and he might not be as objective as he ideally would like to be. And we wonder, its this sincere or is this a strategy? Is he admitting to a wrong because he knows that when he does so, our sympathy and trust for him will grow, or is he admitting to it because it’s the truth?

He is able to tell Sumire's story with flavor and intrigue, and build himself into the fabric of the story in a particularly likable way. Sumire writes “My task now, as narrator, is to gather—ever so carefully—all these elements into a whole.” One of the infinite pulls and pushes in the book. Sumire's theory is K's practice. K writes brilliantly. He forms an intimate bond with the reader, which is useful for the style in which he's writing. The characterization is on point – especially because Murakami builds two tiers of it through the beloved K. K's role and personality as the narrator colors the characterizations of Miu and Sumire, adding to how the reader perceives them.

The language of the story is rich in metaphors and allusions. Whether they be allusions to art or music or literature, K weaves them into the story in such a way that they don't alienate the reader or take away from the story. They add a layer of meaning and understanding (e.g. mentioning The Odyssey to refer to a certain type of travel) but they don't come between the reader and the story (as you might feel when reading T.S. Eliot's Wasteland (I might be projecting... maybe)).

In chapter one, Sumire explains what makes a good story. “A great new story is about to be born – I can feel it. It’ll transport me to some brand-new place” she says. Good writing makes you travel. And this book does make you travel. It takes you to another world. And that’s only one of the reasons why it’s great. 

Murakami has a really subtle way of integrating different themes and details in this story. Nothing seems to appear only once, and things that appear repeatedly are just under the radar. Active reading, taking notes and underlining passages and motifs I liked really helped with seeing this and connecting all the dots. Once I went back to write an outline for this review, I realized that from certain words to overarching themes, everything was deliberate and connected. 

For example, the book starts with a metaphor of Sumire's falling in love being a tornado. It’s a pretty vivid and strange metaphor, yet within a chapter Murakami gives us the connection for it. K is telling Sumire, “But falling in love is always a pretty crazy thing. It might appear out of the blue and just grab you.” In response, Sumire asks, “Like a tornado?”

Another part of this story is the end, the conclusion. It’s not resolved, not entirely. It’s not unsatisfying, it’s suspenseful and I liked it, but it was also eerie in a sense. Which is yet another way to describe the story. There is a sense of unknown. A veil of some sort atop the narrative. A creeping sense of almost supernatural. Almost. But still very much real. Here’s an example of how Murakami depicts the uncanny:

A delayed adolescence, I guess. When I get up in the morning and see my face in the mirror, it looks like someone else’s. If I’m not careful, I might end up left behind.

I glanced at the full-length mirror as I passed by and saw my face. It had a strange expression. It was my face, all right, but where did that look come from? I didn’t feel like retracing my steps and investigating further. 

On a broader scale, the story of Sputnik (where the book’s name comes from) provides a sad symbolization for the characters who are struggling with finding themselves and defining their identities. The book starts with a passage from The Complete Chronicle of World History: 

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, from the Baikanor Space Centre in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Sputnik was 58 cm in diameter, weighed 83.6 kilograms, and orbited the Earth in 96 minutes and 12 seconds. On 3 November of the same year, Sputnik II was successfully launched, with the dog Laika on board. Laika became the first living being to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, but the satellite was never recovered, and Laika ended up sacrificed for the sake of biological research in space. 

Within the story itself we get this passage:

It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?

Sputnik’s story touches on loneliness and and idea of an earth-orbiting spacecraft which could never be recovered. The love and desire that consumes the characters in the story is similar. They are all in orbit – so close yet so far; not voluntarily; and unable to leave. That is unless they are lost. And never come back. 

Danger may be lurking there, something that may end up wounding me deeply, fatally. I might end up losing everything. But there’s no turning back. I can only go with the flow. Even if it means I’ll be burned up, gone for ever.  

The Sputnik nature of their relationships is another main theme. The toxicity, the dependence, the obsession, uncontrollable desire – Murakami explores it all.

And here is a selection of passaged that I really liked:

I think it was the right move, but if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection. 

A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

Hieroglyphic writing, hard, uncompromising. Writing that reminded me of the beetles they discovered inside the pyramids of Egypt. Like it’s going to start crawling and disappear back into the darkness of history. 

Come to think of it, maybe it was a bit too perfect for my taste. Liszt needs to be a bit slippery, and furtive—like music at a village festival. Take out the difficult parts and let me feel the thrill—that’s what I like. 

Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings. 

As I said before, inside us what we know and what we don’t know share the same abode. For convenience’s sake most people erect a wall between them. It makes life easier. But I just swept that wall away. I had to. I hate walls. That’s just the kind of person I am. 

In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites. 

Every story has a time to be told, I convinced her. Otherwise you’ll be forever a prisoner to the secret inside you. 

“Being tough isn’t of itself a bad thing. Looking back on it, though, I can see I was too used to being strong, and never tried to understand those who were weak. I was too used to being fortunate, and didn’t try to understand those less fortunate. Too used to being healthy, and didn’t try to understand the pain of those who weren’t. Whenever I saw a person in trouble, somebody paralysed by events, I decided it was entirely their fault—they just weren’t trying hard enough. People who complain were just plain lazy. My outlook on life was unshakeable, and practical, but lacked any human warmth. And not a single person around me pointed this out. “

“We do things you can’t put into words,” Sumire would probably tell me, putting it into words all the same.

Overall, an amazing read. Similar to The Great Gatsby in style, and a definite favorite that I'd gladly read and re-read.