Sputnik Sweetheart
Haruki Murakami Harvill Press, 229pp, £12
ISBN 186046825X
What with all the favourable reviews and admiring profiles, no one in the west pauses to ask: might Haruki Murakami be taking the mickey? Consider his latest novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, whose opening pages describe a painful love triangle. Sumire is a student dropout and would-be novelist, her writerly resolve a "regular Rock of Gibraltar", although she is also a "hopeless romantic" and "a bit set in her ways". Besotted with her is our narrator, K, who is a primary school teacher. Unfortunately, Sumire has little interest in men, and falls instead for a dynamic and glamorous older woman, Miu. The feeling of love hits her like a tornado, or as if "a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something like an artistic revelation."
You don't have to be Martin Amis to be provoked by Murakami's narrators, with their propensity to cliche and fondness for hackneyed, low-pressure generalisations about life: "Don't pointless things have a place, too, in this far from perfect world?" In a clutch of novels and through a series of translators, these humdrum meditations follow one another without end, or at least "until the cows come home". To describe Murakami's characteristic mode of expression as childlike would be unfair to children: his clunky yet oddly weightless prose often seems to aspire to the banal. By the end of Sputnik Sweetheart in particular - not least when we are solemnly told that "being alone is a terribly lonely thing" - we recognise an author who has taken faux naIvete to the next level.
And yet there is something bold and exhilarating about Murakami's writing, and always has been, dating back to early novels such as A Wild Sheep Chase (published in 1982 and appearing in translation in 1990). It isn't surprising to learn that Sputnik Sweetheart has already sold more than 300,000 copies in Japan, or that Murakami's popularity in the west is on the increase. A major attraction must be the way his novels show an individual's everyday progress through life being suddenly diverted into the weird and fantastical. The formula behind these metaphysical detective stories is by now familiar: very average men follow clues that lead them into a world of implausibility, of bizarre quests for mutant sheep or underground demons, or (as here) into an "other world", a kind of mirror existence that is outside time. Sometimes this transition is eerily effective, and there is a good (think David Lynch) moment in Sputnik Sweetheart where Miu looks down into her own apartment from afar, only to glimpse herself in there, up to no good. Yet, just as often, such passages seem merely silly, barely able to take themselves seriously, let alone convince us.
But perhaps this is also the point. A unique sense of authorial freedom is crucial to the pull of Murakami's work: it is not what happens, but the offhand way it is described. To the reader, it can seem that the plots are elaborated on the hoof, starting then stopping on a whim, yet it is oddly reassuring to spend time with a writer so relaxed he can let us know that he is not trying too hard; that he, too, is unsure where he is heading.
Sumire in Sputnik Sweetheart wants to craft "a massive 19th century-style Total Novel, a kind of portmanteau packed with every possible phenomenon in order to capture the soul and human destiny"; by contrast, Murakami is writing something much more local and ruminative, something more in tune with how we experience life - what we might term a Provisional Novel.
Throwing together just enough scaffolding to hold a plot together allows Murakami to reflect on what are profound and, conventionally, very Japanese preoccupations: the fleeting nature of youth, of love, even of togetherness. Certainly from the melancholic viewpoint of Sputnik Sweetheart, we are all satellites of love, sometimes even strangers to our better selves, attracted to one another yet rarely in sync, at best travelling companions (the literal translation of "sputnik"). Admittedly, there is little that is startling in this conception - and the haunting image of the early space-faring dog, Laika, orbiting the earth ("In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?") is hardly any more original than the idea of a girl who steps between mirror wonderlands and has some trouble making her way back. And yet this daft second-hand mixture is as effective as ever. Murakami knows that the big questions are always going to sound unbearably trite: "Why do people have to be so lonely? What's the point of it all?" But we are grateful that he has contrived a way to ask them all the same.
Julian Loose is the editorial director of Faber and Faber
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