Author: Haruki Murakami

Title: Sputnik Sweetheart

 

I’m taking sips from Murakami’s work. And this time I chose Sputnik Sweetheart. Another intriguing book. He manages again to make me reflect about life, dreams and love. And most importantly to question reality.

He’s very good with words and able to express obvious things nicely. I couldn’t say he’s a poet, that his words are singing in my years. Not at all. But he’s able to touch my inner chords. And that’s enough for me.

Our existence is complicated in itself. Or we like to think so and put so much importance on ourselves. Maybe everything is simple enough. Anyway we can only appreciate things when there is an opposite; and imperfection only make sense when there are enough grains of sand all over.

Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection.

The story of Sumire isn’t new. Only the way Murakami tells it. There are plenty of people who didn’t experience love until a point in time. And then suddenly they were struck by lightening. Love doesn’t knock such that you can greet it nicely. It overwhelms you like a storm. And sadly sometimes never comes either slowly or abruptly. But anyway every person needs to experience things in live in their own way. By reading or listening to others it is not the same as living it yourselves.

It is the same with everything – you have to learn through your own experience, paying your own way. You can’t learn it from a book.

Loneliness is another theme of the book. People are lonely by definition and loneliness is awful. What’s the opposite of loneliness? I have trouble finding the words. When I’m not lonely I’m with people. But being with people it doesn’t mean I’m not lonely. In the end I can only feel through my senses, I can only trust what I can see, hear.

And it came to me then. That we are wonderful traveling companions, but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on 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 happen 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 absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

It’s probably true that no one can understand another one or feel like you do. I wonder if we could in the future connect to each others via devices. And see through people’s hearts. That would be terrible and agonising. To feel all that emptiness. But maybe we could understand each other better. I wonder how could we get rid of this emptiness.

Every one’s world is separate like an orbit. And we understand as much as we can digest. Or maybe as much as we are interested in or we can tolerate. Whatever … At the same time everything goes through our own filter, modelled by our experience. And nothing more. Some of us are more subjective to the outside filters. And some not at all. I wonder how animals perceive this. And if they are at peace with it. We still seem to struggle.

Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.

All characters seem to be lonely. Live their own threads, intersect the others’s lives. However even when terrible things happen they can go on. Indeed after agonising a bit. Some people get wrinkles, some loses hair, some get more white hair, some lose their happiness to live. But they continue going like the trains towards a direction, most often with no more emotions left. The scars are too deep.

Why do people have to be this lonely?What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?

There are many threads in this book. Very similar to Kafka on the shore, to the Windup bird and even to 1Q84. Nevertheless interesting book with many metaphors. I don’t care as much about the real in the book. Indeed how was it possible for Miu to be in two places at the same time? How do you get white hair over night? How can Sumire just disappear in thin air? Is the call in the end real or just in K’s imagination?

I don’t care about all these questions. Probably they come to everybody’s mind.

Murakami is very connected to modern society in his books. He makes reference to brands, wines, etc. I guess he wants to make his stories as real as possible.

There are a few questions that came to my mind:

• Why does Miu have white hair only after two weeks? Usually hair dye is pretty strong especially the black colour.
• How can the main character afford to fly business class with no problem? He’s just a young professor and doesn’t make a fortune. I can’t imagine …

Trivial questions indeed you think. But I feel it like in one of the Game of Thrones episodes when a Starbuck cup was shown. If you want to make it plausible make it good till the end …