If Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart (Supuutoniku no koibito, translated from the Japanese by Philip Gabriel) is about loneliness and longing, and there is a whole lot of unrequited love going on in this story, just how did the characters get there and what made them lose their ability to love, or follow through on the connection anyway. The eternal "why" is asked and agonized over. Murakami offers all sorts of scenarios and throws his characters into awful dilemmas but what it all means? He's tight-lipped and offering no concrete answers (though careful peeling back of layers might offer a little insight).
K. is the narrator of this story. Towards the end he asks, though he asks it in many variations all throughout the book,
"Why do people have to be this lonely? What's the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"
At the center of the story's love triangle is Sumire (Violet in English). She's a budding writer who leads a haphazard sort of existence with her mismatched socks, messy hair and oversized man's jacket. But there is something special about her that draws people to her, something undefinable. When you gaze into her eyes, however, you can always find it, reflected deep down inside. She and K. share a love of books and devour them, reading everything, swapping them back and forth and talking about them endlessly. The pair meet at college, where Sumire drops out and K. earns his degree to become a teacher. K. is the only person Sumire will allow to read her manuscripts. And most importantly K. is in love with her. A love she cannot return but K. will always be her best and deepest friend.
And then Sumire meets Miu, a woman seventeen years her senior. Miu is a sophisticated worldly-wise business woman--slim, elegant and efficient. She runs her family's wine import business and often travels abroad. She offers Sumire a job helping to organize her trips and keep accounts, something of a stretch when Sumire's own life is so disorganized. But she accepts, and the next time K. sees her, she is dressed fashionably, is learning to drive and has even acquired a new apartment in a better part of the city.
Sumire has fallen in love with Miu. And here's where things get complicated. A flow-chart to keep things straight comes in handy about now.
K. loves Sumire and would like to take their relationship to a more physical level.
As much as Sumire loves and admires her friend K., it is only as a friend, and she feels no physical desire for him.
Sumire loves Miu and desires her.
While Miu loves Sumire she can't feel any physical desire for her. (More about that in a minute).
K.'s only physical relationships are with a series of mothers of his pupils, but it is only sexual and love does not come into play.
Have I covered all the bases? I mentioned there was a lot of unrequited love going on in this story. So, like planets orbiting each other, they swirl around in the same solar system, near hits (or near misses as is the case really) is the extent of their connections. They are like the Sputnik satellite that the Russians launched that orbits the earth but is never recovered (and oh how, concerning Sumire in this story, does she resemble that lost satellite). When Sumire first meets Miu she is really into Jack Kerouac and the Beats, which Miu confuses with Sputnik. You know, beatniks and sputniks? There is a lot of playfulness in the telling of this story.
This is a story of unrequited love, that turns into a sort of mystery, too. Not a murder mystery. More a mystery concerning the human heart. Miu takes Sumire with her on a business trip that ends on a tiny Greek island where they are going to have a few lazy days before returning home. And then snap. Just like smoke, Sumire vanishes into thin air. Without a trace.
Sumire exits, stage right. Just like in an existential play. All that existential drama and anguish and longing becomes painfully real.
I said there was no explanation for any of this but that's not entirely true. Murakami does offer some scenarios, but just what they mean is something else entirely. Miu calls K. to come to the aid of his friend. She's not met him, but Sumire has talked about him with great affection and Miu is sure she would want him there. They cannot find her or think of any reasonable explanation as to why she disappeared on such a tiny island. But then K. finds two documents on her laptop. The first recounts Sumire's dreams and is a meditation on her longing for this other woman who cannot love her back. The second retells the strangest story. It is the story of what happened to Miu more than a dozen years earlier when she was living in Switzerland. It's about an experience that left her half a woman and turned her hair white. It's a story of why Miu can no longer love another and perhaps explains where Sumire has gone. Maybe. I won't pretend to understand what happened. The idea of another self and being taken over to the other side.
This is Haruki Murakami we're talking about after all.
This sounds like quite a melancholic story, don't you think? Strangely I don't feel saddened by it. Many of the questions he asks are questions I ask, which is why this is such a perfect read. How does this Japanese man on the other side of the world, speaking a different language, living a different life understand so well what I'm thinking, too?
"Sometimes I feel like my body's turning invisible, like you can see right through me."
When K. sees Miu many months later he thinks she looks like an empty shell of a woman. "Miu was like an empty room after everyone's left."
"So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the thing that's stolen from us--that's snatched right our of our hands--even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness."
Haruki Murakami? Okay. I'm sold.