Sputnik Sweetheart

Katrina Arens

Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior. But whereas Miu is glamorous and successful, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in oversized second clothing and heavy boots that resemble characters from Kerouac novels. Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend, K. about the big questions in life. Meanwhile K wonders whether he should confess his own requited love for Sumire. Then, a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek Island with the news that Sumire has mysteriously vanished.

“Why do millions of 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 here just to nourish human loneliness?”

This novel explores whether loneliness is borne of not being around others or of being apart from one’s self. A novel full of “almosts”, it seems that longing can never truly be divorced from true love. It is so romantic in its exploration of unrealised ambition and yearning, and so thought provoking in terms of its themes regarding identity and reality. In Murakami’s increasingly astral scenarios, the human self becomes a disturbingly malleable thing. With Sumire, It can change beyond recognition; with Miu, it can snap into two! (I won’t go on and spoil the novel for you!). This paradox of present continuous self and an individual’s relationship with the external reality is apparent throughout the book and is what makes this such a memorable and intriguing read.

Apart from the fact that the novel is in itself so beautifully evocative, I believe is resonates greatly with all of us. The idea of a little sputnik orbiting a large planet is not only used as tool throughout the novel to parallel Sumire’s love for Miu, but suggests that all of us are perhaps little sputniks coping with our loneliness in different ways.

What struck me the most about this book wasn’t the sheer beauty of Murakami’s language, but how he hints at the nonexistence of love and the loneliness caused by it. My only takeaway from this novel is that to truly understand love, we must look to our own selves. At the end of the day, no matter how much we feel we are living for a purpose, and for people we love and care about, we are always going to feel some form of loneliness, because we only have ourselves in this world.

A wistful read that leaves you much to think about!

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