An off-center mind

Sputnik Sweetheart
By Haruki Murakami
Vintage, 210 Pages
Available at National Bookstore

The photo of novelist Haruki Murakami on the back cover of Sputnik Sweetheart is printed off-center. This is probably intentional, because the Japanese author is never quite what you’d expect, even by Western standards. He alternates writing off-key fiction that veers into cyberspace and Lynchian weirdness with true-to-life accounts of earthquakes in Kyoto and the deadly nerve gas attack on Tokyo’s subway.

That his fiction is so accessible to Westerners (or the non-Japanese) might have something to do with his casual embrace of Western pop culture. Past novels dissected the Beatles’ influence on Japanese minds (Norwegian Wood), while Sputnik Sweetheart name-checks Jack Kerouac, among others. However, you never get the sense that Murakami, in his late 50s, is trying to show off his Western tastes. They just sort of turn up unannounced, like the Amstel beer his protagonist, K, prefers to drink in Sputnik Sweetheart. His younger characters meanwhile tend to be inscrutable, spooky or death-obsessed – like May Kasahara in The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, or K’s classmate Sumire in this latest.

Pop details might have been the surface hook in Murakami’s previous novels, but in Sputnik Sweetheart he goes for direct emotion, grabbing the reader from the opening paragraph:

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains– flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and all, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be seventeen years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman.

Fumire is a would-be bohemian novelist who wears "black plastic-frame Dizzy Gillespie glasses." One day she develops an instant, irrevocable attraction to Miu, an older, more sophisticated businesswoman whom she meets at a wedding reception. Miu spots Sumire’s copy of Lonesome Traveler and charmingly asks: "Kerouac… Hmm... Wasn’t he a Sputnik?"

Confusing Beatnik for Sputnik is not what gets Sumire going; it’s the casual way this older woman, who is Korean by nationality, touches the younger woman’s hair after she laughs. Before you know it, Sumire is in love and becomes Miu’s personal assistant.

K, meanwhile, is a Tokyo schoolteacher himself in love with Sumire, though their long-lasting relationship is strictly platonic. He gives her advice during late-night phone conversations, but they never break through the barrier of friendship to passion.

When Sumire joins Miu on a wine-buying trip through France and Italy that leads to a vacation in Greece, things start to get weird. Without giving too much of the story away, K learns enough about both Miu and Sumire to be convinced that barriers in this life may also extend to alternate realities as well.

By looking at certain documents in her Powerbook, K uncovers much about Sumire, who sees herself as a soulmate to Miu but also as a "little lost Sputnik," forever locked in a separate path from her muse.

It came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we’d be in instant solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

In a sense, the bulk of Sputnik Sweetheart is designed as a narrative wrapped around the short story that K discovers in the computer files. Miu’s mind-twisting experience – seeing her doppelganger engaging in illicit sexual acts – is a powerful psychological metaphor, calling up at once David Lynch’s alternate realities in Lost Highway and Mulholland Drive, as well as Hitchcock’s fascination with doubles.

Murakami, meanwhile, always seems to turn up in facsimile as the narrator of his own books. The author is said to enjoy beer, jazz, classical music and ironing shirts – all preoccupations which the character K shares. There’s a certain blankness to his narrators, a kind of spaced-out geniality that always puts them in the path of bizarre mystery. It’s perhaps this blankness that allows strange visions – like the dream K has of cats eating his exposed brain matter – to seep inside. K is almost a Japanese Sam Spade, stumbling upon his cases by sheer accident or inertia.

In any case, this is not your grandfather’s old-style Japan we’re talking about here. It’s a bizarre new landscape populated by jazz bars, coffee shops and psychics, mass media and Hitchcock films (one character has a nose "reminding you of Gregory Peck in Spellbound"), Powerbooks and lesbian relationships. And with his eccentric gift for imagery and off-center mind, Murakami may be saying something about the psyche of post-war Japan that has yet to be fully examined or understood.