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Tello's Approved Book Reviews Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (1999/2001) Fiction, 210 pages, finished in 1 1/2 days (July 12th, 2023)

This book has always been a favorite of mine, and one of my fave Murakami works. I've read it many times, but it's been a couple of years since I last read it. It's fun to revisit works you like when you are a different person informed by different philosophies and aesthetics. At the same time, I still feel the giddy excitement I did when I was a teen experiencing these books for the first time and getting engrossed in them.

Murakami's oeuvre is very particular, it's a little hard to describe if you haven't already read him. Surreal magical realism with a flair for heterosexual ponderings, often wandering into intense imagery and speculation about the human condition and the absolute state of women. It's been a while since I've read him, as I said. My last hyperfixation on him was before Killing Commendatore (2017) released, and since then I haven't read anything from him (I've been thinking all these years that Killing Commendatore "just came out", but he released a new book in April and 2017 was 6 years ago...), so my larger views about his work are fuzzy and probably dated since I am no longer 1X age. Still, when I was into him, I read everything he had written except for his short story collections, and I was very enamored with the worlds and characters and ideas he presented. At the time, I was working on a surreal psychological horror novella series called "Flee". I was playing Silent Hill, reading Murakami and listening to "Welcome to Night Vale" and Ice Cube, trying to hang onto my creativity in what was going to be the last year of my life. "Flee" was the last thing I spent extended amounts of time writing, back when I would and could write 30+ pages of fiction a day. At some point during that time, something broke within me, and I haven't been able to write like that since. Not that I would recommend doing such a thing. It's not healthy.

Anyway, "Sputnik Sweetheart" has always captivated me since it feels a lot more "consistent" than other Murakami works. A lot more "striking", "interesting", "relatable". Perhaps I just always favor stories that are about writing. It also features a lesbian, so it is """queer""", as queer as something written by a heterosexual Japanese boomer can be to a 1X-year old. Really, it is queer because I read it as a teenager and absorbed it into my own personal canon, daydreaming about my furry characters engaging with each other in stylish cafes, walking home under a full bright moon, encountering strange, amorphous events, speaking in metaphor, holding each other in the dark.

From here on I will discuss the plot of the book wantonly, so if you're interested in reading it then go away and read it. I do recommend it. There you go, that's my review. Below I will present a brief plot summary before going into finer details.

"Sputnik Sweetheart" follows the story of a young Japanese woman named Sumire and her relationship with an older Korean woman named Miu, presented through the narration of Sumire's best friend, a man referred to as "K". Sumire is young and rambunctious, eager to be a Famous Novelist but lacking in the life experience and discipline needed to craft something meaningful. Miu is older and refined, troubled by a mysterious event in her past, rich, educated, beautiful. She captures Sumire's attention and heart and begins to transform her, and we see their relationship develop through K's eyes. After Sumire suddenly and inexplicably disappears, K is left to pick up the pieces left behind by her and figure out his place in a world without his best friend.

One of the things most interesting about Murakami to me is the depiction of class. Growing up poor, the world of the rich was something fantastical and whimsical to me. In Murakami novels, protagonists are often refined, listening to classical music, consuming expensive branded beverages, driving fancy vehicles, eating refined foods. Even Sumire and K, who lead far more average lives, have an air of refinement about them. They have a certain kind of order to their lives, distinctly untouched by worldly troubles of any kind. It's a very particular sort of old man Japanese aesthetics I am familiar with (Murakami, Yoshiro Kimura, Yuji Kamosawa, etc.). A rhythm I've always found very engaging, since to me it is complete fantasy. It's just as easy for me to get lost in a simple world of people discussing music and novels in colorful metaphor over glasses of Perrier as it is to wander the forest with tribal cats in a soap opera drama or follow the epic journey of a gunslinging cowboy traveling through different dimensions. Comfort and stability is a fantasy. Characters with privilege are funny. It's fun to play pretend.

The most engaging part of the book is Sumire, of course. She is crass, rude, emotional, confused, An Aspiring Author, very well-read and imaginative. She spends so much time writing, but can't ever finish anything. She is plagued by her desire to create something and share it with the world, but can't ever paint the full picture she needs. She is encouraged by K, who is her only friend and the only other person who reads her writing. Unconsciously on the verge of the starving artist trope, she is supported by a small stipend from her parents after dropping out of college to pursue her writing dreams. Unfortunately, this doesn't quite work out, until she meets the beautiful Miu by chance at a family event and gets taken under the older woman's wing. I've always enjoyed Sumire's character, as a fellow Struggling Author. I've written so much, I have dozens of half-finished and mostly-finished novels that have been sitting on my computer for years, so many short stories, furry smut, poems, school essays, analyses, fanfics, blah blah blah. So I've always empathized with Sumire's struggle of trying to order her own internal chaos into something presentable to the outside world. Writing is how we both communicate with others, it is also our passion and our comfort. In this, Murakami delivers what I deem to be excellent writing advice. Your writing will be a parody of life until you gain enough experience to truly write from the heart. This is the core of Sumire's character; she is suddenly thrust into a world unlike anything she's experienced, and begins to come into her own as a result. Still, despite this transformation she remains herself at her core. Funny, brash, introspective, determined. She is refreshing compared to the dainty Miu and the placid K, and this is compounded by the intrigue of her disappearance (and reappearance).

I'm sure "dreamlike" is a word often used to describe Murakami, but I think this novel is an exception to some extent. It is very grounded for most of the novel, which makes it feel more unique. The dreamlike state begins after the climax, where things become more disjointed as a result of Sumire's disappearance. I've always enjoyed this sort of duality the novel has. The climax of the novel involves K traveling to a remote Greek island to help Miu find Sumire, who has suddenly disappeared during a vacation with Miu. The entire setting is "like a dream", from the hectic, hazy travel from Japan to the serenity of the island (which is never referred to by name). It is a quiet, peaceful world, and not even a person's disappearance can disrupt the picturesque beauty and solitude of the island. K travels here at Miu's request to try to help her find Sumire, and ends up alone searching for clues about his friend's disappearance. He ends up finding a computer disk with two pieces written by Sumire just before her disappearance: the first recounting a dream about her mother, and the second recounting the traumatic event Miu experienced long ago that revealed to Sumire the idea of "the other side".

This event is one of my favorite parts of the novel: a young Miu gets trapped in a ferris wheel during a night at a park, and uses binoculars to peer into her own faraway apartment. There, she sees herself engaging in rough, passionate sex with a man whom she had been avoiding for some time. The sight shocks her and she faints. She is discovered in the ferris wheel later by paramedics, who are surprised at the amount of bruises and cuts on her body and that her hair is stark white. As a result of this event, Miu lost all her sexual and creative drive, becoming distant and closed off. Theorizing that her sex drive, her black-haired "other self", had disappeared with that man to "the other side", she has spent years trying to forget the event and move on to living a quiet life managing her family's business. It's a very mysterious event, albeit silly now that I am older, but I related to it a lot being a victim of rape myself. A combination of the rape and consistent physical abuse from my father resulted in my becoming very disconnected from myself; compounded by trans furry feelings, I became a ghost detached from my body and lost myself in a world of books and fantasy, endlessly reading and writing whatever I could. I haven't felt sexual desire for a long time, and abhor most physical touch. So I related to Miu on that level, it was one of the first times I'd ever experienced sexual trauma in fiction (aside from like rape smut fics I guess), so it's always stuck in my mind for that reason.

I think that's common (at least, it is for me). With queer media so lacking, especially when I was 1X, all I could do was take the media I enjoyed and make it my own, view it through my own lens. This is my story, not yours. Finally, something that is mine. Mine, mine, mine.

On the topic of K... He is the narrator and a character in the story, so we often see his thoughts and opinions about what's going on and the like. Compared to Sumire and Miu, he is rather boring, but I think this is intentional in part. He is a sort of anchor, something consistent throughout the story. An unbothered, cool observer to Sumire's life, acting as her best friend and giving her advice and encouragement when she needs it. At the same time, he is hopelessly in love with her, and bottles up his urges and feelings as he knows it's futile to get closer to her sexually (this is further enforced by her realizing she is lesbian). K is what I feel to be the "Murakami Guy", a sort of self-insert male protagonist common in Murakami novels. He excels at his job of delivering to us the much more interesting story of Sumire and Miu, and is a yawn everywhere else. Especially his boner scenes for Sumire, boring! Yawn! Who cares! However, I think his boringness adds a necessary balance to the story. It is the sort of poetic sense of "a normal person encountering something extraordinary", briefly touched by a dreamlike wonder before returning to the humdrum of life. Certainly, what other use do painfully heterosexual men have than to be narrators for lives much more interesting than their own? Not everyone can be cool, this is a fact. I think K has accepted this, and even passes on what he has learned from knowing Sumire to others. He is unbothered by his own normalcy, very content, which is nice. Yeah I just don't have much to say about him. He is a teacher, and I do like his interaction with one of his students later on when he spends some time with a boy who got caught shoplifting. Other than that, there is not much to comment on. I understand his unrequited love is core to the story, perhaps even "the point" of it, as it is in parallel with Sumire's own unrequited love for Miu and the core of both of their characters. Great, wonderful. However, every time I read this book I am always far more invested in Sumire's life than K's. Queer unrequited love is something very real to me, and I engage with that far more. I don't care about K! He is probably the least interesting Murakami Guy.

The ending of the book is one of my favorites. About 6-7 months go by after Sumire disappears, and K begins to move on with his life as a schoolteacher. The incident becomes popular news for a little while, but ends up fading away as news is wont to do. K has dreams of Sumire calling him suddenly in the middle of the night, as she used to do, and still thinks about her often. One night, though, the phone rings for real, and it is, of course, Sumire. She announces she is back, and asks K to come get her at the phone booth she always used to use. The two banter just as they always have, and the novel ends with K opening his window and looking out at the moon, and a vague passage about blood. There's a lot that can be interpreted here: did Sumire kill herself, knowing she could never be with Miu? Did K then in turn kill himself, knowing he could never be with Sumire? I prefer to interpret these books more literally, mostly because it adds to the sense of inexplicable surreality that I enjoy a lot. I enjoy thinking that Sumire disappeared because she really did travel to "the other side", and at long last she managed to find her way back home and immediately phoned her friend. I enjoy the ambivalence, the lack of a concrete explanation. I don't want a metaphor for suicide or rape or whatever other theory, I want there to not be an answer. I find that much more powerful, a character experiencing a fantastical, surreal event and having no way at all to explain it. All you can do is come home and phone your friend in the middle of the night, hear their voice and wake yourself from a long dream. All you can do is dream of your missing friend every night until one night, you finally hear from them. That is part of why I enjoy Murakami so much, and surrealism as a whole, because I don't want an explanation. I want to bask in the mystery; there's a certain level of horror to it. An overpowering, overwhelming feeling. It fills me with the desire to create, to live. Also, I like a happy ending, and I consider Sumire suddenly reappearing to be the sort of ending I'd want. I'd want to hear her stories, and read the novel she would finally be able to write as a result of her experiences in "the other side". I'm optimistic, I want her to have the growth she needed.

Overall, I still enjoyed it as much as I did years ago. Its mystery, L'Engle-esque character dynamics, focus on writing, and surreal imagery all appeal to me still. I wasn't bored or bemoaning the cishet hegemony as I usually do nowadays when experiencing normie media, but do be prepared for straight guy bonerisms present throughout the book. They're appealing in a way, again, because of the fantasy of refinement and class presented in this novel. Normal people having sex and going to work and drinking fancy water and watching soccer games... Wow! So funny! And they are plagued by mysterious surreality that disrupts their comfort, giving them a view of "the other side"... It's fun to read about, as someone who is from "the other side" being held here, painfully, against my will.

I think it's a good entry point into Murakami, as it's shorter than his more well-known works like "Kafka on the Shore", and is more grounded and less wandering. "1Q84" was terrible, I don't remember "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki" or "South of the Border, West of the Sun", etc. etc. I haven't read "Killing Commendatore" because it is a million pages and my ADHD is pretty bad nowadays. Maybe I will re-read all his books so I can form a better opinion as to how Good or Bad he is based on my Current Superior Objective Taste. I think my other favorites by him are "Wind/Pinball" and "After Dark".

That's all for this Tello's Books Reviews. Read a book, it's good for your health. Next I shall be reading "Urchin of the Riding Stars" by M.I. McAllister. It's like Redwall but squirrels I guess, idk I don't remember. Remember, only read Good Books, not Bad Books, and remember, there is no such thing as "good" or "bad".

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