What I Am Reading: "Sputnik Sweetheart" by Haruki Murakami
Murakami is another author I have strictly rationed, allotting one book every summer. This summer was one of his older and shorter books, Sputnik Sweetheart, which was a sad book about unrequited love.
The novel's narrator, K, lives a quiet life as a schoolteacher, a few years out of college. His main social interaction is with his friend Sumire, an aspiring novelist with whom he is in love. After a solitary childhood, K's interactions with Sumire greatly expanded his horizons, and he often serves as a sounding board for her late-night phonecalls and her novels that never quite congeal. She dropped out of college to pursue writing, and is a bit of a misfit, and a bit of a manic pixie dream girl.
She never returns his affection. Instead, she falls in love with an older woman named Miu, whom she meets at a cousin's wedding. When talking about the literature that Sumire is into at the time, Miu misremembers Kerouac as a "Sputnik" instead of a "Beatnik," giving the novel its title. Sumire takes up work for Miu's upscale import-export business, and is introduced into the world of fashion, wine, and reserved high society. However, as a result of following Miu's lead in life, she finds herself unable to write.
K reassures her that this writer's block is probably just the result of acclimating to changes in life, but Sumire is only able to do one more spate of writing before she disappears from a mountain cabin while vacationing with Miu on a Greek isle. The last writings tell of Sumire's dreams revolving around failing to communicate with her late mother before she (in the dream) disappears to the other side; and of Miu's pieced-together backstory.
Over a decade earlier, Miu had spent a summer in a quiet and provincial Swiss town, and one evening, deep into her disillusionment with the place, became trapped on the town's carnival ferris wheel as the town closed for the night. Through her opera glasses, she was able to look into her own apartment's window, where she saw a doppelganger of herself having sex with the unsettling man who had been stalking her around town. When she came to in the hospital later, having been apparently rescued from the ferris wheel, Miu's hair had gone entirely white, and she was no longer able to experience sexual attraction (the whole situation seems to me to be a pretty clear rape allegory, as Miu feels defiled by witnessing the sex act).
This trauma or disposition leads her to gently reject Sumire on the night of her disappearance. As Sumire writes about how perhaps Miu's young, sexually-active doppelganger split off from Miu and disappeared into an undefined other world, K's evidence-gathering after the fact leads him to speculate that Sumire has done the same.
The story ends on a downer and irresolute note, with K struggling with his newly empty life in Sumire's absence. It's kind of a bummer novel, but Murakami writes well about loneliness and longing. It’s a quiet summer novel with a sense of rumination instead of one of urgency. I have a firm preference for Murakami’s longer novels, though: more page-length lets them lure you in and immerse yourself in their sedate set-up before the weirdness really gets rolling.