Man's best friend outside of a dog, 2: Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami

Before the book review, a quick digression on judging a book by it's cover. Here are the eight cover designs I found between British and American versions and the original Japanese paperback.











Picture number 1 is vastly more explicit than the book tends to be, and while 2 and 3 are at least relevant to the Greek Island part of the book, the same complaint applies. Number 4 is more abstract, and does accurately reflect the notion in the book of characters who feel split in two, but the tone is still wrong, as this design was originally chosen for Murakami's other romantic books, like Norwegian Wood and the like. 5, taken from a critical scene in the book, and 6, a picture of Sputnik, are just a bit too literal for my taste. My favorites are 7, the version I own, and 8, both of which combine the joke in the title with the romantic aspect of the story. Honestly, though, some of these designs are so different that I wonder if the text would seem different between the covers as well; the first visual impression you get from a book isn't trivial after all, maxims about judgment be damned.

Anyway, on to the book Review:

Sputnik Sweetheart, by Haruki Murakami ISBN: 0375726055 Compare prices at fetchbook.info Categories: Asian authors, UIUC Book Club

Murakami ranks highly on the list of my favorite authors, and in many ways this book helps to explain why. It is a smaller, more compact effort that his quasi-science fiction classics like Hard-Boiled Wonderland and Wind-up Bird Chronicle, lacking their scope but able to bring more focus to its topic. Like all Murakami books, our protagonist is a lonely man who feels detached in his day-to-day life. He is in love with a woman, Sumire, who feels nothing for him but falls madly in love with another woman, Miu, setting up a rather strange love triangle of frustrated desires and heartbreak.

In other hands, this would be a book that cuts to the heart of pain and loneliness, but that is hardly Murakami's style. Instead, he pushes their fears and desires into the dreamworld, where metaphors for detachment (disappearing into oneself, feeling split in two) become literal physical manifestations, and where his evocative but introverted prose has its maximum effect. In some sense, we all understand how an interior monologue works, but there is new ground to be found in a world where such thoughts are made flesh while remaining unconstrained by ordinary notions of reality and logic. I am not sure if this reading is correct, but it struck me that the two crucial incidents in the lives of the female characters, described here in dreamy and relatively unthreatening tones, are very suggestive of much darker analogues in the real world. If this is intended, then the book becomes a more disturbing work, in which we use out fantasies not to explore potential fates outside our control but to protect us from real life and all its associated unpleasantness. Either way, Murakami remains the master of tangential feeling, allowing us to see into his characters in a way that they themselves cannot. If his books tend to leave an ambiguous aftertaste, that is almost certainly the point; we live not in a world of absolutes but rather one of shades of meaning that we impose over external reality. This one fits that description well, bizarre at times but ultimately a satisfying exploration of loneliness and the ways in which we deal with it.