book review: Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami

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MURAKAMI HARUKI: SPUTNIK SWEETHEART

This book is...soft. I started reading Murakami with A Wild Sheep Chase and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and had just read Kafka on the Shore the summer before I read Sputnik Sweetheart. There's something different about SS.... It's a quieter work--hurts more after putting it down, sticks with you afterwards, showing up when you don't expect it to, reminding you why it matters. 

I've wondered about Murakami's writing structure before, the way he styles plot, symbols, and interweaves character narratives into a thicket that you have to kind of slice through and then repair on your own, like cutting out stitches in a knitted scarf and then trying to tie them back together--but it felt good for this story; the narrative distance from events ties everything together into something you can interact with more easily, though Murakami isn't a writer to actually write out all the answers his stories raise. The best thing you can do if you read this book is to go into it having convinced yourself not to resist your reactions to what it's doing--Japanese, magical-realistic narratives are simultaneously in-your-face and pretty subtle, and Sputnik Sweetheart, for everything that's startling about it, is emotionally intelligent, and a little sneaky. The title--Sputnik Sweetheart--is both sweet because of its appearance as a phrase in the story itself, but also serves as a summary of the book's emotional story. 

Miu, whose transcendent and traumatic experience in the ferris wheel leaves her stranded between two worlds with white hair that regenerates every day as reminder that the past happened, might be like Laika on board Sputnik itself, gazing out, maybe, into space, down at earth--but also, Sumire might be like Laika, Sumire whose heart is a hoarder, whose return from the other world isn't metaphor, isn't symbol for something bigger, just is--K might be Laika, K, whose world is pinned down and measured out by Sumire but who finds himself launched into, maybe, emptiness like space when she disappears, spending that time gazing out at stars only to have his vision reoriented on earth when she returns.... Murakami writes about outsiders, people who are always going places, writes about airplanes and trains and walks down ocean paths and swims down into the ocean on moonlit nights. All motion, and also no motion, is forward motion in space--what's there to orient you? Life doesn't move linearly in Murakami's narratives, and it's not circular--not orderly and regularly patterned like a knitted scarf, either. Life is like the bundle of of a protein, like the erratic flickering in and out of physical space of the electrons in an atom's cloud, motion so small and irregular that to the eye too far away, it looks like it's standing still.

*I posted this review on Goodreads first, but at Dad's suggestion am now posting it here (ᅌᴗᅌ* )

writing music: 숲 by Epik High

I keep track of the music I write to in iTunes, but I often find it useful when others share the music they write to, and what they’re writing when they listen to it. I’m currently editing the piece I last posted about, editing in new scenes and fleshing out a few others. 

I love this song—숲 (pronounced “soop,” meaning “forest” or “woods” in Korean) by Epik High. It makes me think about low light, and being alone somewhere. I listen to it between more active scenes or before I start revisions to get myself in a good mindset for going back to a place I’d been before, left, and might have forgotten. I’m ready to discover a little more about my characters and their landscape after I’ve listened to this one. I don’t know how to say it better—maybe that it opens my heart a little, so that I become more aware of my own voices.

Epik High is a hip-hop group, so a lot of their other music is different, but “Epilogue,” their last album before hiatus in 2010 while the members served their mandatory military service,  has a couple other interesting instrumental songs, “Blossom” and “서랍”, pronounced “suh-rahp,” which means “drawer.” I also like to write low-light scenes (night time, early morning...) to “Harajuku Days” and “쉿” (pronounced “shwit,” like the English “shh!”) from the album “Lovescream” and “Icarus Walks” from “Breakdown.”  

Medicine

I get in these moods. There’s one story I’ve written recently that I really really like, that means a lot to me, and I realized that this is the first time it’s happened for a story I’ve written for school. There are stories that you write because they’re interesting to you, and they sort of bug you like, when are you going to write me? you should write me. Then there are other stories that just sort of rocket around in your heart for a while, growing bigger and accumulating over time; at some point, whatever point, the point they need to be born, their voice is quieter, but it hurts more: you need to write me. You need me. 

Stories I’ve written for school so far have been ideas I’ve had—curiosities I’ve humored. What about this: a character who’s so shy that when a boy talks to her for the first time she cries about it later? What about this: a talkative student getting obsessed with a quiet one and trying to figure out the secret to quietness? What about this: a couple on their first marriage anniversary trip to London? What about this: a pothead who bounces through addictions, marijuana to love to Scrabble? 

But the fifth one—I can’t even talk about why I wrote it because the subject is so tender to me. I’ve just written this paragraph and deleted it several times. In the end, I find I can’t write it at all, so I’ll just move on…. 

What I’ve got now as my fifth story, the title story of my honors thesis project, is thirty pages of prose in which I expose my own preoccupation with a language and culture I’ve never actually encountered, my self-consciousness over it, the story of a girl and her childhood friend who bring home an international student from their college across the country for spring break. They drive down PCH to see the sunrise over the ocean on a morning in late March. That’s it. That’s the story, intercut with flashback and rumination. But writing it was embarrassing. I had to acknowledge several things about myself and my interest in this particular language and culture that I wouldn’t want to, normally, put into words, nonetheless into characters, to whom a writer owes the highest duty and care…. 

So I get in these moods. I write something that’s deeply, desperately important to me, and then I want to keep it where nobody can see it. I want to keep everything I write in which I bare my heart secret. But then I think about all the things I’ve read that have moved me even just a little bit, or that have totally changed my life, that have helped me decide that I need to keep writing when it’s seemed hopeless, when I’ve looked back and just hated everything I’d done, when my faults assume preeminence over the things I manage to do well…. And I think about what my life might be like without those things in them, and wonder if I could possibly serve that role in somebody else’s life. 

I went through this tumultuous period of not caring whether or not I’d end up as a good person after I’d realized some things about myself that I’d been ignoring before—but I’m over that. I want to be good; I’d like to live well, to be useful. What use are the gifts God’s given to me—if I can say that of myself, that writing is a God-given gift?—if I can’t work up the courage to share them? Maybe this is difficult to understand. People at work I talk to about my writing don’t understand why I’d go through the process of writing a book and then not try to put it out into the world. I guess if you don’t write, if you’re looking at it from that angle, to publish a book seems to be the reason people write books. But I like this explanation:

“Writing a book is horrible,” George Orwell said, “an exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” 

I love to write. I like what language can do, what I can ask language to do, how I can push every sentence to the limit of my ability to express a certain idea in the exact way I want to express it. Language is like this, mutable to personality and improbably capable. I believe in language more than I believe in anything else—that gets me into trouble more often than not. For example—people say “actions speak louder than words” so often that growing up I took it for granted and, thinking of myself as a person of above-average capability in this world, I didn’t ever think that, when faced with opportunities in which I had to make a thought or an intention into action, it would be so hard. 

I’m shy; I’ve never asked myself seriously not to be, so I continue to be. It’s really difficult for me to do things, though I intend things all the time. So I’m just saying all this because I love to write, but the best writing, the kind that arises out of some need on the part of the writer, the story that emerges because the writer absolutely needs it to exist…to write that story, it’s incredibly painful. I think that maybe to other people, by the evidence of how much I persist in making mistakes and bypassing correct decisions, it looks like maybe I don’t know what’s wrong with me. But I do know; and I know that apathy concerning reforming myself is just another of my multitudinous faults. 

So what writing does for me is it allows me a very small outlet through which to make good out of my mistakes. Stories need to exist in the world—if I can write them despite being a subpar human—in fact, if I can write them off the energy that arises when I encounter and engage with my own failures and insecurities—then maybe my stories can help me learn how to be better. 

But I’m still in a mood about it. I still have second thoughts about completing the thesis because if I do it means other people get to read it. Are going to read it. Can I do that? Put my heart on the page that way and invite others in? That is not something I am accustomed to doing; so my heart’s a little rocky sometimes, despite being emotion liquefaction mostly. 

“He oft finds med’cine, who his griefe imparts” (Spenser)

Winter Break Reading Recommendations

I ask fellow literature majors for reading recommendations all the time, and usually I get responses like you have to read Middlemarch! you have to read The Faerie Queene! you have to read War and Peace! and I love long books, but here are some of my recs for things I am 100% sure you'll have time to finish over a three-week period amongst other holiday activities :) personal absolute favorites bolded. 

poetry

• DU FU: A Life in Poetry, Translated by David Young (ISBN 978-0-375-71160-2)
• Dearest Creature by Amy Gerstler (ISBN 978-0143116356)
• The Wild Iris by Louise Gluck (ISBN 978-0880013345)
  
• School of the Arts by Mark Doty (ISBN 978-0060752460)
• On the Other Side, Blue by Collier Nogues (ISBN 978-1935536079)
• Small Porcelain Head by Allison Benis White (ISBN 978-1935536277)
• Room Service by Ron Carlson (ISBN 978-1597092333)
• Dreams and Dust by Don Marquis (this one is difficult to find because he's largely out of print right now, but my copy's ISBN is 978-1409917991)
• Fragile Acts by Allan Peterson (ISBN 978-1936365807)
• The Light the World Appears in by James Kimble (this one is also difficult to find, my uni library had a copy! ISBN 978-0941179058) 
• The Light Around the Body by Robert Bly (ISBN 978-0060907860)
• Self-Portrait with Crayon by Allison Benis White (ISBN 978-1880834831)
• Odas a las cosas / Odes to Common Things by Pablo Neruda (highly encourage you to read these in Spanish if you can!! ISBN 978-0821220801)
• Cien sonetos de amor por Pablo Neruda (you actually need to read these in Spanish: translations often miss the mark. ISBN 978-9875803008)
• The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas (you might not have time to finish this one, but I can't ever recommend poetry without including this poet's work. He's incredible, beautiful. ISBN 978-0811218818)

short fiction (i.e. "short stories" / compilations of short fiction)

• Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog by Dylan Thomas (ISBN 978-0811202077)
• Widow by Michelle Latiolais (ISBN 978-1934137307)
• "Milk" & "Blood" by Ron Carlson (+link to "Milk" & "Blood" is in The News of the World ISBN 978-0393331783)
• Nine Stories by J.D. Salinger (ISBN 9780316767729) 
• "Dog Run Moon" by Callan Wink (in New Yorker, September 26, 2011, p.104-)
• "The Liar" by Tobias Wolff (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237) 
• "Sonny's Blues" by James Baldwin (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "Weekend" by Ann Beatie (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "The Lover of Horses" by Tess Gallagher (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "A Poetics for Bullies" by Stanley Elkin (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237) 
• "Akhnilo" by James Salter (in American Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 978-0440204237)
• "Winter Dreams" by F. Scott Fitzgerald (in Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 044037864)
• "The Open Window" by "Saki" (H.H. Munro) (in Short Story Masterpieces ISBN 044037864)
• In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (ISBN 978-0684822761)
• St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves by Karen Russell (ISBN 978-0307276674)

fiction

• All Quiet on the Western Front by E.M. Remarque (ISBN 0899662927 preferred but any translation is fine)
• We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson (ISBN 978-0143039976)
• Tinkers by Paul Harding (ISBN 978-1934137123)
• Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout (ISBN  978-0553763065)

non-fiction / essay

• A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis (ISBN 978-0802724700)
• Willa Cather on Writing: Critical Studies on Writing as an Art (ISBN 0803263325) 
• Quite Early One Morning by Dylan Thomas (I HAVEN'T READ THIS ONE YET BUT IT'S DYLAN THOMAS COME ON ISBN 9780811202084)
• Proofs and Theories by Louise Gluck (ISBN 9780880014427)
• Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke (ISBN 978-0393310399)

non-fiction / autobiography

• The Language of Blood by Jane Jeong Trenka (ISBN 978-1555974268)
• Final Exam by Pauline W. Chen (ISBN 978-0307275370)

to find a way, we lose control

you are the night

you are the ocean

you are the light behind a cloud

late october

A career fair on campus yesterday. I walked by booths for UCLA graduate studies, for USC graduate studies, UCI graduate studies—came upon one for University of Glasgow graduate studies. A woman with a rag of blond hair sat alone on her iPhone at the table. Why is nobody at this table? I walked slow to look at the pictures of the Scottish Highlands on the flyers. Glasgow, of course, is not in the highlands. Glasgow is a dark city of rain and a hunching urban populace and old churches and buildings whose absolute upward force opposes the down-slope of tired shoulders. Glasgow is an old city, beautiful in its dank austerity. But I like the pictures of the grasses and shocks of small white flowers, the clouds and surreally blue sky. I walk past a table, also empty, of University of Dublin graduate studies. Do you know I wore this exact shirt in Dublin about a year ago? There’s a man standing alone with his hands behind his back. I offer him a small smile. Can you believe it either, there’s nobody by your table. 

Past the fair now and headed up the stairs into the library, where I’ll sit for an hour to finish an essay, I think about turning around—heading back to the Dublin table, asking, so—what if I’m broke. What if I’m in debt. And what if I just have lost the plot. What if school doesn’t matter to me anymore. What if I’m looking to your school and your dirty dark urine-scented-cornered city to make something matter to me again, what if I’m looking to your school because I just don’t know where else to go; what if I’m broke and I don’t want to work, what if I want to be the world’s biggest dreamer and I think it’d be great to do it with you. What if University of Dublin can help me to not be tired. What if I tell you that I’m using this graduate program to be close to The Book of Kells, over which I teared up last fall, my breath misting the display case, obscuring my own reflection. What if I told you that that was one of the only moments in the whole of my life that I remember being surrounded by people but feeling totally, peacefully alone, just me and that illuminated manuscript and the cold city. What if I said—hey, about Irvine. I’m afraid to leave my home—I’m afraid to stay. Do you still want to see my resume. I bring you with reverent hands the books of my numberless dreams

Mid-October

I’ve meant to write about my classes in some detail; but as it happens the most salient thing I could tell you about any of them is that they are the reason I haven’t been able to write about them yet. So that’s sort of neat, in a stupid way.

(By the way—I’ve rediscovered the word “stupid” in an attempt to re-establish an elastic vocabulary—purely as a resource for the fiction I’m writing, obviously!—and, you know, it’s great to feel eight again. “Stupid” is a really elastic word. Everything can be stupid. Everything is in a varying, fluctuating state of stupidness. But the way that you employ the word can relay a precision in degree of insult. It’s great. The world is bright and once again full of possibility.

Actually, when I was eight, my third-grade teacher had to lecture the class about the impact of verbal slurs—it was a small private school and most of us had been together since Kindergarten, and you know, kids are kind of mean, and at this age just discovering that insults are a beautiful way to employ creative intelligence—think of “thou elvish-mark’d, abortive, rooting hog!,” that beautiful slur delivered by Queen Anne in Richard III— and I remember this teacher telling us that the definition of “stupid” was “worthless” and how could we call any of our classmates worthless? Honestly—pretty easily. We were eight. Also, this is the same lady who took me to the beach once and made me eat the crust on my packed turkey sandwich, claiming that little girls who ate the crust of the bread would have beautiful nails and hair. Naturally, anything she said should have been taken into extremely careful consideration, but I was eight. Now, I know better, by actual fact. Bread crust and nails/hair have nothing to do with each other and I was duped, shamelessly.)

I’ll just give you the bare bones:

• MWF: Logic & Philosophy of Science, 09:00
• TuTh: Asian American Autobiographies, 11:00 // Literature of True Crime, 12:30

Reading for my TuTh classes is heavy. My professor for True Crime is this sort of old guy who, when he looks at you and points vaguely in your direction if he’s calling on you to participate in class, is always maddeningly imprecise with his gaze—maybe it’s his glasses, but I can absolutely never tell when he’s calling on me because he’s looking two rows behind me. Also when he’s looking at other people, he’s never actually looking at them. Maybe it’s a side effect of having seen too many bodies or other horrible things during his years riding along with the LAPD Homicide unit. I just don’t know. But I bring him up because he makes the excuse for so much reading by saying that we’d want to read the books he assigns anyway, even if we weren’t in his class. Stupid! You don’t know anything about me!

My professor for Asian American Autobiographies is someone I’d like to be friends with outside of class. He seems like a plentiful resource for his subjects—English and Asian American Studies—and I trust his class discussions. I posted a homework assignment on our class site and he emailed me later to tell me I’d done a good job. He’s also always smiling at lame jokes that kids make in class as if it’s the first time he’d ever heard them, which is impossible because he’s way older than me and I’d heard of them….This is the main thing that makes me question my vague aspirations to be a professor, myself, one day—how do I make kids think they’re not being stupid when they are? Should I suffer fools? I just don’t know. Anyway, the reading for this class is really emotional for me—I have a sort of hypersensitivity to the memories that the writers relay, and I’m not sure why. Certainly I have lived a very wonderbread, white-American existence, not without awareness of and appreciation for other cultures as they brushed up against mine or infiltrated it briefly….It’d be a nightmare of mine to have to teach any class where your choices range from the pedantic and the politically-correct, to the absolute stereotype. Today’s language hasn’t adapted as quickly in terms of culture to the nuances of the Asian American experience—I think—so we, college students, daft and somewhat unimaginative, already have crude tools to work with. I come out of each class feeling like it’s a miracle that we’re not insulting each other left and right out of ignorance. Instead people just say really lame things. There are a couple people in the class whose opinions I find interesting, but other than that I’d rather have a permanent office-hour one-on-one with Jim (professor who won’t be called professor…) twice a week. I think. At least, at this point, that’s true. We’ll see how the rest of the quarter goes.

My professor for LPS is smart and enthusiastic and funny. He suffers no fools. When someone in the lecture—which is large, almost 200 students, but small for an LPS introductory course—asks a stupid question, he’ll point up to the lecture slide where the answer is stated plainly and he’ll say something like, “clearly, yes” or “clearly not.” He also wears the same outfit to class every day. It’s a black v-neck t-shirt and a pair of black trousers. Everything is sort of merged into what could be mistaken as a jumpsuit by a thick black belt under his belly. He has really short gray hair and a big curly dark beard. What’s weird about his clothes is not just that he’s always wearing the same thing, but that, once, I saw him before class and he was wearing tan cargo shorts and what I think was a bright purple t-shirt. In lecture that day he was in his lecture suit. I don’t know what’s going on. 

On top of classes, I’m also working on stories to compile, at the end of the year, my senior thesis for the Campuswide Honors Program. I’m working with Ron Carlson, who is a real character. If I was set on getting to be a really good writer I think I’d make him a permanent project and not quit at writing until I’d gotten him onto the page. 

I’ve been reading Verses on Bird: Selected Poems by Zhang Er—

Poetry, my future, the blurred future of you and me

Pitch black. You already can’t see the hand in front of your face

At daybreak, you catch up with you

I’m hoping a daybreak comes for me, soon.