Sputnik Sweetheart - love as self destruction

[hwarium]

I enjoyed this Murakami so much because I was writing my Murakami thesis at the time. (March 2023). I was so excited every time I encountered a familiar trope because it seemed to fit into my metaphor theories or added a new dimension of meaning. I borrowed this book from the library and dog-eared every page so badly, it took me half an hour to undo it all before I returned it.

The premise was actually unique to Murakami, K, the narrator, is an outsider to the main events which is the relationship between Sumire and Miu. Sumire and Miu recount their stories to him, which gives the novel this gothic mood because it becomes a frame narrative (a story within a story, like Frankenstein or Rime of the Ancient Mariner). The thing about frame narratives is that the whole structure creates this cautionary tale or parallel back to the narrator, this subtle warning about what could happen. And so when I saw the unrequited love conga line of K -> Sumire -> Miu, my brain just started broadcasting exclamation marks (!!!!!). People loving who they can never have!!!! Suffering because of a love that can not be contained within their body (!!!!)

Why this book is crazy

Let me set this up. K (25M) is an elementary school teacher in Japan who is in love with his carefree friend Sumire (22F). Sumire's feeling listless, she's not quite sure what she wants out of life, and she's never experienced sexual attraction. And then she meets Miu (42F), an ethnically Korean woman working and living in Japan. Miu is sophisticated and confident and 17 years older and Sumire immediately falls in love. Miu however, has lost a part of herself during an incident on a Ferris wheel, and has been unable to love since that night.

K, a mundane man with a stable job but tries to maintain a distance with the world. Sumire, a lost young woman frantically trying to find a meaning to life. Miu, a jaded businesswoman who no longer knows how to feel alive.

DO YOU SEE THE VISION. It's not just love. It's the thematic setup of everyone loving someone who has something they do not have, but that love can not be returned because the object of their affection is also missing a part of themselves.

This is what I love about Murakami. It's not just things happening, but the things have been set up to be a metaphor for desire and identity. Everything else, all the other details, feed into this grand design. E.g.

• Sumire's a writer, but when she develops this sexual attraction to Miu, she develops writer's block ("Sumire wrote some works that had a beginning. And some that had an end. But never one that had both a beginning and an end.")
• Sumire also never knew her mother, who passed away when she was young. She constantly has these dreams where she's trying to reach her mum, but fails. All she knows from her father is that her mother had nice handwriting, was good at remembering things, and named her after a Mozart piece: ("What a strange way to describe someone. Sumire was waiting expectantly, the snow-white first page of her notebook propped open, for nourishing words that could have been a source of warmth and comfort - a pillar, an axis, to help prop up her uncertain life here on this third planet from the sun. Her father could have said something that his young daughter could have held on to. But Sumire's father wasn't going to speak those words, the very words she needed the most.") SO, Sumire also has this longing for a motherly love, but desperately seeks a foundation for her identity, her name (and if you transpose this loss onto her love for Miu!!!)
• But Miu is barren, after the ferris wheel incident she no longer had periods and could not conceive children (aka she could never be a mother !!!).
• And the Mozart piece ("the Violet") written for a poem in which a violet is trampled by a careless girl ("He sank and died, but happily: and so I die then let me die, for her, for her, beneath her darling feet"). THE METAPHORS FOR UNREQUITED LOVE HERE!!
• K's self-loathing when Sumire goes missing! He still has this sexual desire for Sumire, but hates himself for his physical reaction during his grief and misery (being mad at your own irrationality! The self destruction from love when you are not ready for it!!)
• The physical disappearances of Sumire and Miu!! Their adverse reactions to desire!
• Sumire feeling like she's being disassembled, like she's now living in a "deconstructive illusion", feeling like she has to confess or she will die from the inside! ("Act that way and slowly but surely I will fade away. All the dawns and twilight will rob me, piece by piece, of myself, and before long my very life will be shaved away completely - and I will end up nothing".)
• And Miu's surreal Ferris wheel experience. When she was s stuck up there on a freezing night she saw, through a window, a version of herself having sex with a man. (“I was still on this side, but another me, maybe half of me, had gone over to the other side. Taking with it my black hair, my sexual desire, my periods, my ovulation perhaps even the will to love. And the other half that was left is the person you see here. I've felt this way for the longest time - that in a Ferris wheel in a small Swiss town, for a reason I can't explain, I was split in two forever.") But then, 14 years later, meeting Sumire: "I wish I could have met you as a whole.")
• My personal reading is that Sumire was always aromantic and asexual, but the development of feelings for Miu and the subsequent rejection, caused her to vanish into the "other side". She only returns when she has reconciled her feelings with her identity - she doesn't need to love to be complete. Whereas for Miu, she could not handle the part of herself that desires men, so that part of her completely split away into the dream world, and she continues to exist as one half of herself. She only realises later that she lost more than just her desire for men, but also the desire for woman, love, and life.

One day I will write a story set in the 1990s

All of the fun from Sputnik Sweetheart came from playing with this theory of unrequited love of letting the plot work itself into metaphors. Other than this, I also enjoyed the following:

• The book was published in 1999 so I loved all the details about that era. Phone books and landlines, Sumire calling from a phone box, characters going to cafes to listen to music, K receiving calls from a hotel lobby. All office equipment like the filing cabinet, the fax, the Powerbook.
  
• Murakami's descriptions of the mundane, written with so much love. Like how Sumire's writing routine involved waking up at noon, walking at the park, reading with bread and a cigarette, buying supermarket beer then writing at 11pm with a coffee mug, a pack of Malboros and a glass ashtray.
• Of course, all the little references to literature (I won't bore you, but I like to scribble these down and look them up later, to learn a bit more about the world or to discover a new layer to the metaphor).
• The subtle commentary about writing and how stories require a spark of life (and the extended metaphor of Sumire's writer's block against her unrequited love for Miu): "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. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.")

Other Murakami recs

To close off, if you enjoyed Sputnik Sweetheart, I would recommend Colourless Tsukuru Tazaki and his years of pilgrimage because there's the same tint of loss and longing, desire and identity. These are also the only two Murakami novels with queer relationships if you would like to chase that detail. If you're interested in the metaphors around creativity, art and rebirth, Killing Commendatore is absolutely fantastic if you're brave enough to pick up the brick of a book. However, it's probably a good idea to read Kafka on the Shore first to download the ideas about parallel worlds, shadows of the soul, and sins of the father. If you do read Kafka first, you might also the similar chase between people and the other half of themselves, just like Plato's theory of the soulmates (Kafka is also shorter, and has more street clout). As I said in my Murakami thesis, I think part of the fun of reading Murakami is learning his visual languages, to learn what metaphor speaks for what character and how certain things may be a symbol for something else, so when a book is read, two stories emerge. The one on the page, and the one in the reader's heart.