"Sputnik Sweetheart", By Haruki Murakami
Published on January 16th, 2025
Another Murakami book on this blog! Seriously, I love reading his novels and this one has certainly entered in my top of all time. Just to warn you, this book contains a couple of sensitive topics that I won't be mentioning here in order to everybody be able to read the post, however think twice before buying if you don't like this kind of thing.
Like many other Murakami's novels, this also discusses dualism, especially the distinction between dream and reality. As far as I've noticed, this is the most common charactheristic of the author's books and is generally a central part of the plot, and with "Sputnik Sweetheart" it's not different.
The novel is written in the perspective of K., a history teacher living in Tokyo who loves reading. He's the best (and only) friend of Sumire, the girl that is the main focus of the plot. She is an aspiring novelist who lives with an allowance given by her father and stepmother. Both met at college randomly (thry were four semesters apart from each other), however Sumire ended up giving on it because it was not what she want.
She, as well as K. loved reading and this was what firstly united them, however, as the time past, they started to create a stronger bond to a point where they could talk about everything. Usually Sumire would call K. in the middle of the night to talk with him, what somewhat annoyed K., but he always answered her.
Sumire - Violet in Japanese - has this name because of the piece Das Veilchen of Mozart. Her mother loved the piece because it sounded sweet, however the lyrics are the complete opposite, telling the story of a girl who destroys a violet without even noticing, inspired by a poem of Goethe. This annoys her but she still used her name when necessary.
During one of their conversations, Sumire mentioned not being able to complete the start or end of a book, making her writing always incomplete. She doubted she would ever finish somethings, in her view, she lacked some key internal component as she also never felt passion or love to anynone. However, K. argued she would one day fall in love with somebody, what six months later happened. Also, he told her that stories are things that take their "soul" from the other world - what resembles me of Plato's World of Ideas. Then, K. explained an ancient Chinese superstition of killing dogs and distributing their bloods in sacrifice to the fallen warriors in order to ask them protection. The blood of the dogs would symbolize the passsagem from "here" to "there", as this would connect both worlds.
As K. predicted, Sumire had fallen in love - for a older woman. Her name was Miu and she was a Korean entroponeour who inherited her father's company and was its president even though she didn't work there, rather she had a wine importing company that bought from all over Europe. They met in an event and talked a lot about music. In fact, Miu studied piano in France and Switzerland, however an event that happened 14 years prior made she stop completely. They agreed in everything when it came to music and by the end of the event Sumire was already in love.
Then, Miu offered Sumire a job in her company, which she accepted even though it was different from what she originally intended. There, she'd learn Italian while also being a kind of sercretary of Miu. In the event, Miu asked what was the difference between sign and symbol (a duality), what she didn't quite know. Thus, she asked K. which answered her comparing Japan with the King of Japan.
Suddenly, Sumire disappeared, however she actually went to Europe with Miu, as she later clarified to K., for work. There they spent most of their time in Italy, however they met a English man who offered them a stay in his summer cabin in a Greek island not far from Rhodes. They were having a good time until Sumire completely disappeared. Then Miu called K. and asked if he could came to Greece and help in the search for Sumire, what he promptely does although he had to start working in one week.
There, he learns things about both Miu and Sumire, that I prefer to not say here, but they didn't help to find Sumire at all. However, they clarified she was in this kind of other world, as well as half of Miu. She somehow ran away there and K. was sure of that. He had some experiences involving it as well while he was in the island. Then he returend to Tokyo, and after a while received a call from Sumire saying she returned, comparing her journey to Ulisses' odissey to Ithaca.
Miu, however, disappeared. K. had seen her once, but she was unacessible and appeared to be just a shell, in the middle of life and death. In my view, she was the "dog" Sumire had sacrificed. She had to let her go, then she'd be able to become whole, complete. Like a satellite, they met and fell in love, but their orbits would soon get separated and would never meet again.
As far as I see, Murakami likes to work with dualism in his novels, and here he points out how things such as dream and reality, life and death, and even sign and symbol, are intrinsically connected to eachother, and some things are born from the mixture of those. However, the two are always opposite forces, who keep an consistent eternal duel (like Hegel's Dialectics). Moreover, I see Murakami arguaing that dualism isin't everything, pointing out the importance of subtle changes, and that reality works more like a gradient rather than a simple two collor pallete.
Sumire is an in between, in my view, travelling in between the two worlds, two personalities, masculine and feminine. To be honest, reading Murakami is hard, it takes a while to mature the ideas of a book of his. But, as K.'s personal motto says, a little original thought/idea of yours is better than the whole previously discovered great ideas.
Thank you for reading! Today I managed to write a really long post. If you read the book and want to discuss, my email is in the contact section of the blog.