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* )