Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami (1999)

A young man is in love with his only friend, who's in love with another woman who doesn't love her, and then something strange happens.

Book Review:  Sputnik Sweetheart only touches on the bizarre, and is closer in style to Norwegian Wood than Haruki Murakami's more magical or fantastical books such as The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle or Kafka on the Shore. Our unnamed first-person narrator ("K") is in love with his close friend from school, Sumire, but she is in love with her employer, Miu, an older married woman. The blurb on the back of Sputnik Sweetheart gives away the main event, which occurs about halfway through the book (so I won't). Not a lot happens in Sputnik Sweetheart; much of it is about unfulfilled passions. K wants to fulfill his relationship with Sumire, but is resigned to remaining her friend. Sumire drops out of school to fulfill her passion to be a writer, but is unsuccessful and finally gives it up when she falls in love with Miu, but her love is unrequited and that passion too is unfulfilled. Miu has lost her passion and lives only an, outwardly perfect, half-life. So rather than a love triangle we have a "love line-segment." The book is filled with doubles and triples of loss and longing. Murakami writes of the dog Laika, fated to die alone in Sputnik 2, or a cat that went up a tree and disappeared. Sumire worries that her love will cause her to lose everything, as a chunk of ice left in the sun, that time will leave her behind, that she is being reinvented, but to what end? Gradually she feels less and less herself. Sumire has a long dream sequence about her lost mother. Miu has lost herself and is only half a person. Murakami also uses this book to deploy his collection of similes: "I was as exhausted as an old railroad tie"; "books that didn't fit into the bookshelf lay piled on the floor like a bunch of intellectual refugees."

This quiet book is classic Haruki Murakami, (well translated by Philip Gabriel), but mostly involving passion over plot, and leads to an extended ending: Sputnik Sweetheart ends maybe two or three times, but then keeps going until the final uncertain conclusion. What really happened is up to the reader; how the reader feels about Sputnik Sweetheart will largely depend on how the reader feels about the ending(s). Tho quieter, less dramatic, less magical that his other books, Sputnik Sweetheart, (Murakami's ninth novel) is still enjoyable, an extended reverie, an emotional experience well worth reading. [4 Stars]