| Author |
Laura Miller |
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| Date |
April 19, 2001 |
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| Media |
Salon.com |
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| Link |
http://archive.salon.com/books/review/200
1/04/19/murakami/ |
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A cult-favorite novelist's seductive,
eerie tale of a vanished lover. |
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Trying to nail down the seductive,
surreal melancholy of Haruki Murakami's novels is like trying
to bottle fog. His characters can be found drifting around Tokyo,
checking out French new wave movies, drinking glasses of red
wine, listening to Brahms on their hi-fis, reading Raymond Chandler
-- almost always alone. A Murakami hero is the well-groomed
guy sitting by himself at the end of the counter in an all-night
coffee shop, smoking perhaps and staring off into space. Chances
are he's puzzled over a recent encounter with an enigmatic woman.
Chances are she's disappeared. And chances are he won't ever
quite figure out what's happened to her. |
"Sputnik Sweetheart" is a slim novel in comparison with Murakami's most recent opus, "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle." ("Norwegian Wood" is a very early book published in the U.S. for the first time last year.) Its unnamed narrator remains true to Murakami form, a teacher by "a process of elimination" -- he simply isn't engaged enough to try for a more demanding career. The one thing he does care about is an old college friend, Sumire, a misfit girl with literary ambitions who, much to his pain, has no feelings for him "as a man." They're close enough, though, that when Sumire finally does fall in love with her wine-importer employer -- a beautiful married woman 17 years her senior -- he's the one to hear all about it.
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The first 70 pages or so of "Sputnik Sweetheart" construct this romantic triangle: He loves Sumire, Sumire loves Miu and whatever goes on in Miu's head is anyone's guess. Then Miu takes Sumire with her on a trip to Europe, and while the two women vacation on a Greek island, Sumire vanishes without a trace. Miu asks the narrator to fly out to the island and help with the search. Once there, he finds a handful of tantalizing clues: an odd conversation Miu and Sumire had about a spooked cat, a diary that Sumire kept on a floppy disk in which she writes of "entering the world of dreams and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time," and, strangest of all, Sumire's transcript of a secret Miu told her, the story of how Miu's black hair turned entirely white during a single night in a little Swiss town.
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Murakami knows that the most haunting tales never have all their
loose ends tied up by the last page, but unlike "The Wind-Up
Bird Chronicle," "Sputnik Sweetheart" doesn't
leave too many of them unspooled and dangling. It's a tighter
book, if less grand and captivating, and the point of this exercise
in the uncanny feels more focused. "Why do people have
to be this lonely?" the narrator asks:
I closed my eyes and listened carefully for the descendants
of Sputnik, even now circling the earth, gravity their only
tie to the planet. Lonely metal souls in the unimpeded darkness
of space, they meet, pass each other, and part, never to meet
again. No words passing between them. No promises to keep.
Back in Japan, there will be a significant moment with a kleptomaniac
child and a few more surprising encounters, but the lovely,
sad, eerie Murakami spell remains firmly in place, the sense
of its perfectly still center inviolate. It's still impossible
to nail down, but its ingredients include loneliness, longing
and an undeniable and sometimes frightening thread of the miraculous
woven into the very fabric of life.
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| Link |
http://archive.salon.com/books/review/200
1/04/19/murakami/ |
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| Author |
? |
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| Date |
2001 |
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| Media |
Publisher's Weekly |
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| Link |
none |
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Sputnik Sweetheart |
Murakami's seventh novel to be translated into English is a
short, enigmatic chronicle of unrequited desire involving three
acquaintances the narrator, a 24-year-old Tokyo schoolteacher;
his friend Sumire, an erratic, dreamy writer who idolizes Jack
Kerouac; and Miu, a beautiful married businesswoman with a secret
in her past so harrowing it has turned her hair snowy white.
When Sumire abandons her writing for life as an assistant to
Miu and later disappears while the two are vacationing on a
Greek island, the narrator/teacher travels across the world
to help find her. |
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Once on the island, he discovers Sumire has written two stories:
one explaining the extent of her longing for Miu; the second
revealing the secret from Miu's past that bleached her hair
and prevents her from getting close to anyone. All of the characters
suffer from bouts of existential despair, and in the end, back
in Tokyo, having lost both of his potential saviors and deciding
to end a loveless affair with a student's mother, the narrator
laments his loneliness. Though the story is almost stark in
its simplicity more like Murakami's romantic Norwegian Wood
than his surreal Wind-Up Bird Chronicles the careful intimacy
of the protagonists' conversation and their tightly controlled
passion for each other make this slim book worthwhile. Like
a Zen koan, Murakami's tale of the search for human connection
asks only questions, offers no answers and must be meditated
upon to provide meaning. |
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| Author |
Tom LeClair |
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| Date |
May 2001 |
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| Media |
Book Magazine |
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| Link |
http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue16/tleclair.shtml |
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Colliding Worlds |
Sputnik Sweetheart seems the obverse of Underground, a close-focused,
personal work about how easily worlds can separate. And yet
this novel has at its center three extravagantly alienated characters
who might have joined Aum had they not been devoted to each
other. Sumire is a twenty-two-year-old college dropout working
on a "Total Novel" when she surprises herself by falling
in love with Miu, a thirty-nine-year-old married businesswoman.
A narrator identified only as "K," a twenty-five-year-old
elementary school teacher, is in love with Sumire, but Sumire
wants him only as a friend. As children, both Sumire and K were
estranged from their families and lost themselves in books and
music. Miu is also an outsider, a Korean in Japan who suffers
from alienation in her twenties.
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Miu employs Sumire and takes her on a European business trip,
which ends with a vacation on a Greek island. When Miu rebuffs
Sumire's sexual advances, she disappears. K travels to Greece
to look for Sumire, who leaves behind two computer files that
recount dreams and stories of "the other side."
Has Sumire dreamed her way to some kind of Aum spirit world?
Has K briefly crossed over? Not surprisingly, Murakami leaves
these questions unanswered, for his book is more about mind-altering
longing than literally breaking through the mirror that his
characters believe keep worlds separate.
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Sputnik Sweetheart is a sometimes tender, too often banal
story of young love that lavishes attention on its characters'
feelings and leaves fuzzy the literal worlds they occupy.
The disappearance plot seems laid on to ratchet up "other
side" speculation and to use the author's travel information,
some of which is simply wrong about Greece.
Even if Sputnik Sweetheart were better, more obviously the
work of its experienced author than its mooning narrator,
releasing the book with Underground might still have been
a mistake. Miu says she has no interest in fiction because
"it's all made up." The sweethearts Murakami has
made up seem like figments—authorial displacements—next
to the people he interviewed. Only in the last thirty pages,
when K returns to Japan, does the novel begin to have the
workaday texture and emotional purchase of the interviews.
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Sputnik Sweetheart presents its characters
as orbiting earth and each other, in communication but not in
contact. After spending years composing Underground, perhaps
Murakami needed to let his imagination rise. I wish it had found
a more substantial vehicle, say a space-station novel, one peopled
with adults, even if crazed adults like those in Aum. |
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| Link |
http://www.bookmagazine.com/issue16/tleclair.shtml |
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| Author |
Michael Anft |
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| Date |
2001 |
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| Media |
Baltimore City Paper |
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| Link |
http://www.citypaper.com/2001-08-01/imprint2.html |
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Perhaps the most typically "Western" of a modern,
fecund batch of Japanese writers, Haruki Murakami has jury-rigged
a style from the subterranean preoccupations of Don DeLillo,
the geography of catastrophic relationships laid bare by Raymond
Carver, and the hellish, quasi-sci-fi specters of Stephen King.
And yet, despite all his influences (which includes a pop-culture
fetish;
one of his novels is titled Norwegian Wood), Murakami is never
static or prone to empty flattery. The ambitious author loaded
up his 1997 shotgun marriage of a masterpiece, The Wind-Up Bird
Chronicle, with Eastern-tinged metaphysics, pop-cult references,
fresh and unlikely characters, and briskly paced storytelling.
At its heart--as in almost all Murakami fiction--was a pervasive
disconnectedness. His characters don't so much "relate"
as circle each other, dreams unfulfilled, love unreturned, unblissfully
unaware of what others are feeling.
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Thus, the title image of Murakami's new novel, Sputnik Sweetheart,
is fitting. Like the Soviet satellite, the inhabitants of
Murakami's not-quite-bizarre love triangle are stuck in their
own orbits. The story's heroine, Sumire, wonders why the Soviets
named their space device Sputnik, which in Russian means "traveling
companion": "It's just a poor little lump of metal,
spinning around the earth." The edgy and wanting Sumire,
her lonely friend K, and Sumire's love interest, Miu, have
their metallic exteriors, while the soul of an engine churns
inside them.
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For the bookish, sensitive K, a schoolteacher who has loved
Sumire secretly since their days together at college, she
represents a freedom of expression he can never attain. K
loves Sumire for her beauty, her ambition to write novels,
and her otherness--a fresher, more vibrant version of the
aloneness and alienation he feels. Yet he never tells her.
Instead, he ends up as her adviser for the relationship she
is trying to build with her first and only love interest,
Miu, an older professional woman.
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Sumire, new to the ways of love, allows time to take its
course, hoping that she and Miu will deepen their relationship
on a trip to Greece. But Miu has a past that includes a harrowing
night spent in an amusement park during which she lost her
libido, among other things. Like the unloved Sumire and emotionally
stunted K, she is incomplete.
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As usual, Murakami's almost-breezy narrative carries us along
through pages of otherwise unremarkable plot with incredible,
entertaining ease. Such interior portraits could become banal
in the hands of a writer less assured or less trusting of
his audience.
Ultimately, though, Murakami throws us into a metaphysical
black hole with an ending that seems forced and tacked-on.
One of the few missteps in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was
its scattered, loose-ended closing. In Sputnik Sweetheart,
Murakami tries the tied-up-in-a-bundle (but just a little
loopy) ending--and it falls flat.
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| Link |
http://www.citypaper.com/2001-08-01/imprint2.html |
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| Author |
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| Date |
May 17, 2001 |
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| Media |
The Economist |
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| Link |
http://www.economist.com/books/display
Story.cfm?Story_ID=624215 |
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Tokyo Blues |
GIRLS who think they are lesbians.
Boys who think they are in love with them. Random, anonymous
couplings in pay-by-the-hour hotels. Mysterious disappearances
and equally unexplained sadness, even madness—such is the
gloomy psychological landscape in which Haruki Murakami sets
his novels. Geographically, it is Tokyo, but it might be any
of the world’s vast, unforgiving cities, where people get
lost like tears in the rain and finding love is sometimes as
hard as solving Rubik’s cube in the dark.
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European and American fiction moved on from this kind of
relentless nihilism, this fascination with “feelings
of immeasurable emptiness”—not to mention a fixation
with the Beatles—quite some time ago. But in Japan it
is still popular, especially among a burgeoning new generation
of so-called “freeters”: young people who cannot
be bothered to get a full-time job because, like Mr Murakami’s
latest heroine, Sumire, they can live off their parents. Translated
into English and shipped back to Europe and America, this
dark, if not particularly original, brew is rapidly attaining
cult status in the West too.
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This is not to say that the books are no good. Reading Murakami
is an unsettling, disorienting experience that can leave you
feeling, well, immeasurably empty. “Sputnik Sweetheart”,
his latest offering to appear in English, though slighter
than some of its predecessors, quickly draws you in and holds
you there. It delicately sketches the misery of its (bookish
but drifting) narrator, K, in love unrequitedly with a (brilliant
but confused) drop-out student, Sumire, who in turn unrequitedly
loves the older, enigmatic Miu. It comes as no surprise that
Miu is a woman.
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K, whom Sumire loves but does not desire, makes do with occasional
nights with the mother of one of his pupils, who doesn’t
even merit an initial. When the action abruptly switches to
an unnamed island in the Dodecanese, we discover that disaffected
Japanese urbanites are not really any happier there.
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As for the title, what better metaphor
for modern life, at least in Murakami-land, than solitary satellites
drifting through space? Sometimes, if the author is to be believed,
the orbit of one satellite will briefly intersect with another’s,
but then off they go, alone again. Actually, that is not the
way satellite orbits work—but why should a dreary matter
of fact stand in the way of a good miserabilist image? Even
bleaker is the narrator’s identification with Laika, the
Russian dog sent into space on a Sputnik for research purposes.
Is the lot of Tokyoites quite as bad as all that?
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| Link |
http://www.economist.com/books/display
Story.cfm?Story_ID=624215 |
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