13. Sputnik Sweetheart

Right now, I’m thinking of three groups that travel. Some travel simply to find a place, generally accomplished by getting a chance to view a certain location first hand and experience its “authentic” culture (on a side note, after taking this course I don’t think I can ever use the term “authentic” without quotes, because really, what is “authentic”?) Then there are the existentialists. Half travel to find themselves, and the others travel to be lost, to lose control by situating themselves in an unfamiliar location with unfamiliar faces. Miu, K, and Sumire fall a criteria or two short of each group.
 
K’s reasoning for travel was rather unconventional: to lead a two-man search party, garnering clues and playing detective for a couple days on a remote Greek Island. The luster of a Grecian vacation never took flight; and K was left unfulfilled from experiencing the enlightenment a traveler should truly experience. A few trips to the beach, a couple bottles of wine and fresh Mediterranean seafood could only fill up his stomach, not the gaping hole he becomes when Sumire isn’t within reach. It seems like he floats through the few days he is in Europe with a looming numbness, and his conversations with Miu, although intriguing, elicit only slight physical response.
 
It’s uncertain whether or not Miu is in search of her second half; the Miu she wants to see when she looks into the mirror, but a different Miu than what is reflected back at her. The ease of the Grecian sunshine, simplistic routine and carefree sexuality, relax her. The island lifestyle suites the white-haired Miu nicely, and she feels no pressure or obligation to work.
 
Although Miu feels comfortable swimming nude with Sumire, a brief sexual encounter seems to push Miu’s boundaries, not physically, as Miu would oblige to any of Sumire’s requests, but emotionally. After she lost half of herself on the Ferris wheel, she doesn’t have enough of herself to give. Not to her husband. Not even to Sumire.
 
Sumire, the novels most dynamic figure, is constantly frustrated with her stagnant pen and it’s inability to produce anything meaningful. She neglects to realize that very few literary works worthy of claiming the title “Classic” can be written by someone so young, with so little life experience. Sumire’s willingness to escort Miu, and to be her “Sputnik”, wasn’t just an impulsive act of lust, but a search for material. Maybe Sumire’s disappearance was a necessary way for her to throw herself into a place she doesn’t instantly understand, and can’t instantly describe with words. Sumire’s travel to Greece was the efforts of a young author to find her literature, not herself.

From the beginning, Sumire’s story delineates her transformation from emulating the Beat Generation authors such as Kerouac to acting like a classy, working woman. Her influence and reason for change was Miu. When Miu was introduced, the narrator recognized the fact that he did not know if this was her real name. It was simply “what everyone called her.” In addition, the narrator himself is only referred to as “K”. Sumire’s name is said to mean Violet. We are told later that Sumire does not like her name due to its origin from a song about a child stepping on Violets. It seems, then, that these characters are experiencing some sort of identity crisis in different ways.

“Sumire was a hopeless romantic, set in her ways- a bit innocent, to put a nice spin on it.” In describing her innocence the reader is led to view her as a sweet, naïve girl. The next lines, however, describe her smoking habit and her dislike of the majority of people she meets. It is as if Sumire is a Kerouac-loving, independent woman on the inside, but outwardly she transcends into the life of professionalism and conventions. The loss of this initial, inward identity occurs only shortly after Sumire and Miu meet at the wedding.

Sumire expresses understanding of Kerouac’s lonely lifestyle, as her favorite book of his is Lonesome Traveler. It is interesting that she can admire his ability to spend time in solitude but she seems to become attached to Miu as soon as they meet. It is as if she craves these qualities in herself but they fail to exist. Sumire “wanted to be…wild, cool, dissolute”. The narrator then describes the way Sumire acts aloof. It is clear that her actions are a result of her trying to become a sort of character. It is difficult for the reader to know which of these identities truly define Sumire. We see her experience different people and different sexual orientations without actually defining herself.

Beauty also presents itself as a theme in the novel. Sumire’s father is said to be so handsome that even Miu was speechless when she saw his picture. Miu herself is made out to be beautiful and Sumire seems to be searching for that as well. Sumire is dissatisfied with herself due to the fact that she continually tries to emulate those around her. This is a recipe for disaster in that she is never going to be fully content with her self. Sumire’s life is defined by her love for Miu. The book even opens with the line, “In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.” K, the narrator, seems to think that in telling her story, as this is his perception of it, her love for Miu is more important than she herself is.

Knowing that this would be another travel fiction, I naturally looked for where that travel part would begin. When Kerouac was mentioned as Sumire’s “literary Idol of the Month” I thought maybe the novel’s about Sumire going crisscrossing Japan or elsewhere like Kerouac did himself or spend some “lonely months in a cabin on top of a high mountain, working as a fire lookout” for time and experience, which she decides she needs to write.
 
Both Sumire and the narrator go travelling on a whim, unplanned and their trips are “arranged” by Miu, with whom the three characters form a love triangle.  Sumire is asked to tag along her employer Miu’s business trip around Europe as her personal secretary: “[Miu] just blurted this out one morning, took [Sumire] by complete surprise” (71). Likewise, the narrator, too, embarks on a journey to Greece, a country he never thought of going before, on an unexpected, urgent call from Miu at 2:00am on a particular day.
 
Their travel story is quite unusual. There is no planning involved for Sumire and the narrator. Sumire simply accompanies Miu sightseeing in Milan, visiting a few wineries in Tuscany, staying a couple days in Rome, shopping in Paris, and ending up in a Greek island for a complete vacation. The narrator, just having been called by Miu that something has happened to Sumire, simply buys the ticket to Greece and travels right away, only finding out about the place as he goes from guidebooks and such. Sumire vanishes like the cat in her memory on the fourth day at the beach cottage, an incident that brings the narrator to travel miles away from home, just a week before school starts. 

The circular love sensation that spreads throughout Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart consists of an unattainable love that all characters seek to fulfill. Starting off with our narrator, K, we see how much he is in love with Sumire, his only “true friend.” From the beginning of the story K makes it clear that he will never feel the reciprocation of love he desires so greatly, due to the fact that Sumire is a lesbian who has fallen for an older woman named Miu, whom she met at a wedding reception and now works for. Despite her physical attraction to Miu, Sumire always remains loyal to K, for they have been best friends for years. A writer, she constantly calls him in the middle of the night asking for advice about her work or just to talk, and K gladly obliges. He is the only one Sumire trusts to let see her work, as they are each other’s only real friends. Throughout the course of the novel, their relationship never weakens, and neither does K’s love for Sumire. Over time, K slept with multiple women and had several girlfriends but he admitted to the reader that even though he had these extra distractions to get his mind off of Sumire, he still would occasionally think about her when performing sexual acts. Also, even long after the search for Sumire had ended, K would still think about her, and miss her.

Paralleling this trend of unfulfilled love is Sumire’s relationship with Miu. While in Miu’s bed in Greece, the two admit feelings for each other, but due to Miu’s past, she is unable to feel and act in a sexual manner, thus making it difficult for Sumire to cope. Though we are unsure as to why Sumire disappeared and then randomly reappeared, this incident in Miu’s bed may have something to do with it. At the end of the day, however, Sumire returns to K. As if coming full circle, he receives a call from her in the middle of the night at their “good old faithful telephone booth,” six months after her disappearance, claiming to have “gone through bloody hell” to get back to him. They will never be together in a romantic way, but they will always love each other, and even the little sexual distractions that come along the way in life will never break their friendship. 

So now we have entered the heady zone of travel fictions with Murakami’s "Sputnik Sweetheart".  We are on another plane of travel where the antics of fanny-packing tourists don’t seem to even come into the picture (only in passing mentions to tourists and tour groups when K is in Greece).  None of our three main characters would ever consider strapping on a fanny pack.  Physical travel seems to come second to a sort of mental/psychological travelling.  Murakami is getting at a much deeper form of travel than just “leaving on a jet plane”. 

Yes, the places Sumire and Miu go to change them, but it’s not because of the feta and olives or the Swiss chocolate.  The places bring out the realities of their identities.  Like we’ve said since pretty much the beginning, travel makes us aware of facets of ourselves we had forgotten or didn’t know existed. Pico Iyer talks about it in the essay we read at the beginning of the semester, “Why We Travel”: “…it…shows us all the parts of ourselves that might otherwise grow rusty…in traveling to a truly foreign place, we inevitably travel to…hidden inward passages…we’d otherwise seldom have cause to visit,” (Iyer, pg. 2).  Both Sumire and Miu get introduced to these new or “hidden” (Iyer, p. 2) parts of themselves in these foreign places, and they don’t really have a choice about it.  Murakami is really getting into what happens inside the human body during travel.  He cavorts in these “hidden inward passages”.  They can muck us up internally and throw us curveballs. We have to find some semblance of our original selves in all of it and like K did that night in Greece hold onto “a huge rock” (pg. 170) to stay sane. 

Yes, Greece as location was important to the story and to Sumire’s experience, but so were her previous experiences back home with Miu and K. The travel story is only sad because we have heard so much about the good relationships Sumire has with Miu and K which were established back home in Japan.  Without the back-story, her disappearance and the whole Grecian adventure wouldn’t have as much power and significance as they do.  Sumire’s travel experience isn’t as tragic as Miu’s though because we get a sense perhaps Sumire is better off on “the other side” (see pg. 178).  She isn't in, our favorite topic of discussion, the abyss.  "The other side" isn't the abyss. However, the sky, especially at night, does still retain the sense of foreboding that it did in "The Sheltering Sky".  Maybe all travel regardless of how adventurous it is, how far you stray from the prescribed path many, many before you have taken, is a trip to “the other side”.  Maybe some are too ignorant to reach “the other side” or even see it’s there, but others like Sumire, Miu, and K who have “curiosity” (p. 170) engage with it wholeheartedly (yet even K keeps a distance from it, not giving in to it completely on pgs. 170-171).  Travel is wherever we find that “other side” and decide how far we will go with it, how far into those “inward passages”.

Every main character in Haruki Muakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart is a loner at heart, but seeks companionship in others despite how it does not help. In one of the last scenes of the novel, “K”, the narrator, opens up to Carrot with a secret. Miu earlier says that all stories have to be told or else they will itch at oneself forever before she unloads her experience on piano as well as the origin of her pure white hair. Carrot had deeper inner problems that urged him to shoplift and K wants to help. The cause of his actions remains unknown like many of the unsolved problems in the novel.

K says “’I haven’t told anybody yet… but during summer vacation I went to Greece... My friend just quietly vanished like smoke”(193) causing a small reaction in Carrot’s otherwise vacant expression. The phrase “I haven’t told anybody yet…” is a technique that is also used by Tim O’Brien in The Things They Carried when he tries to get the reader to believe him. It gives off the feeling that one is let in on a secret and that sense makes the listener or reader more intrigued to pay attention and believe.

K relieves himself of his secret and continues with loneliness and the sense of belonging. For a period, K accepted loneliness as a part of “surviving on one’s own” (195) until Sumire entered his life. Then loneliness at all seemed awful. I really liked when K asked Carrot, “Have you ever done that? Stand at the mouth of a large river and watch the water flow into the sea?” The reason it’s so sad is because the water in the river wants to be a part of a whole. It naturally flows down the path of least resistance so it can join the whole like how people want to get together. Then, Carrot sees the drainage ditch “river” and possibly sees himself, a small individual body of water that leads to no other source (that he can see from the bridge). It is alone. 

Sputnik Sweetheart is another one of the romantic travel stories that we have encountered numerously throughout the semester. It is written around characters that love one another but cannot have the people they truly want and desire. The story revolves around the main character Sumire who comes from a small village in Japan and goes on to live on her own and drop out of college to become a writer. The author, Haruki Murakami then describes to us how Sumire and K establish relationships and how Sumire and Miu eventually get close as well. From the beginning of the book, the readers can get the sense that the narrator is in love with Sumire but she simply likes him as her closest friend and nothing more. Sumire then goes on to fall in love with Miu which I think is very interesting. She has barely known her and yet she loves her more than a man that she has many conversations with and knows much more about. Murakami doesn't only make this story one of those in which lovers cannot ever be together because of outside circumstances. He throws in the twist of finding one's self through travel which is a travel theme that has been expressed multiple times throughout this semester as well.

In this story, travel becomes the transformation point for these characters. None of them while traveling to these locations whether it be the Greek Island or even Switzerland, realize what impact their journey will have on them. K states in the story that, “Sumire said she missed me. But she had Miu beside her. I had no one. All I had was- me. Same as always” (77). He then goes on to say, “Was I really going to get on a plane and fly all the way to Greece? The answer was yes. I had no other choice” (81). Although he realizes that Sumire has someone else that she’s interested in, she has gone missing and he loves her and no matter what wants to be tied to her somehow. The minute he embarks on this travel, he finds that he has changed from what he was before. K doesn’t think of life in the same manner as he did before and only wants to find K so that he never loses her from his life.

Miu also develops a close relationship with Sumire in which she details during her conversation with K about Sumire’s disappearance. Sumire loves her passionately and Miu loves her back but not in the same intimate manner. Miu has already undergone a transformation as a result of travel. Miu states, “I was still on this side, here. But another me had gone over to the other side” (157). Miu during her trip to Switzerland underwent the transformation that occurs with travel often. She no longer wanted to have sex with anyone and couldn’t experience the passionate love that Sumire had towards her. Sumire after realizing that she couldn’t experience love with the Miu that was in the house with her, embarks on her own person al journey to find the meaning behind her life. Although we are not told what exactly happens to Sumire and how this journey goes, by the end of the book we are given a clue on it. K states at the end of the book, “Good. We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me” (210). It seems that K has finally undergone his personal and mental transformation as well. He finally understands how to connect with Sumire and so now they can be in the same world once again. The author cleverly ties in this final moment with Document 1 on Sumire’s floppy disk which is titled, “Did You Ever See Anyone Shot By a Gun Without Bleeding?”. K gets “shot by this gun” and cannot find any blood on his hands at the end which means that he now understands what has happened to Sumire and understands where he must go from here on out in the future.

I really enjoyed Sputnik Sweetheart because it showed how travel could be interpersonal rather than geographical.  The prime example of this was how falling in love, for Sumire, seemed to offer her the same sensations that the characters from our other travel fictions have experienced.  The narrator of Sputnik Sweetheart even articulates some of these travel themes when he describes Sumire’s love: Sumire felt like she “didn’t have any choice. [Love] may very well be a special place, some place [she’s] never seen before.  Danger may be lurking there… But there’s no turning back” (25).  Just like the characters of the Sheltering Sky or Daisy Miller were heading into danger and could/did not turn back, Sumire doesn’t turn back from traveling into love. 
 
As the novel progresses, love continues to follow the travel themes we have constantly been exposed to.  In particular falling in love in Sputnik Sweetheart mirrors Sal’s journeys in Kerouac’s On The Road (Sputnik Sweetheart makes no attempt to hide this correlation, and instead confirms the similarities by often referring to Kerouac).  For example, Sputnik’s main character Sumire, is a writer who is in need of “time and experience” to advance her craft, and through the narrator “K” and love interest Miu it quickly becomes apparent that love and even sexual experiences are more specifically the type of experiences that Sumire needs.  In On The Road, the narrator Sal was also in need of “life experiences” and embarked on his journey to achieve them.
 
Interestingly, while Sal’s “life experiences” included love and sexual experiences, Sumire’s revolved around love and sex.  This is plainly identified in a conversation K and Sumire have about her writings in which Sumire says, “Time and experience.  There’s not much you can do about time… But experience? Don’t tell me that. I’m not proud of it, but I don’t have sexual desire.  And what sort of experience can a writer have if she doesn’t feel passion?” (17).  Clearly, Sumire’s needed experience revolves around jumpstarting her passion, which seems to mean having sex. 
 
This difference between Sal’s and Sumire’s “life experiences” (one just travel experiences, the other falling and love and discovering passion) highlights why I enjoyed this novel so much.  A travel can be like Sal and geographically move to achieve what they “need,” but just as powerful an experience can come from falling in love and looking for passion in one another. 

Throughout Sputnik SweetheartSumire is on the threshold of two worlds. At the beginning of the story she starts in “this” world and by the end of the story she has moved into the “other” world, however for most of the story she is in between both sides, never fully immersed in either one.
 
Sumire’s relationships with Miu and “K” represent the two different sides for her (even though she may not be directly aware of it). As is made clear with Miu’s description of the two worlds, the “other” side is represented by Miu’s “sexual desire” and “perhaps even [her] will to live” (157) whereas “this” side is presumably represented by the opposite. From this one can speculate that Sumire’s completely (from her point of view) un-sexual relationship with “K” would symbolize “this” side and her (again, from her point of view) sexually charged relationship with Miu symbolizes the “other” side. I believe that Sumire’s neutral position between the two worlds is also signified by the fact that she can never finish her stories—she waits for her stories to “transport [her] to some brand-new place” (15) but she can never reach that point because she is stuck in the middle.
 
Although I don’t really understand why Sumire chooses to disappear into the “other” world at the end of the novel, I don’t believe that it is only because of her unrequited sexual desire for Miu. The fact that she can’t finish her novels helps drive her disappearance as well. At the beginning of the story, “K” is the one who tells her “a story is not something of this world” (16). The fact that “K’s” job is a teacher and Sumire so often calls him for advice makes it seem almost as if her is her guide. “K” guides to the other world with words and Miu guides Sumire with (unintended) sexuality. The ending of this novel was very complex and difficult, I think, for anybody to fully understand. This blog post was just an effort on my part to examine what could have led Sumire to leave “this” side.

 

“A journey without an end” is how K describes his quest to find the lost Sumire (121). However, Sumire and Miu’s own experiences could be described the same way. How can a journey end if there is no real resolution? There is of course the ultimate conclusion of death, but life is a constant struggle, and when one task concludes, another begins resulting in a constant stream of trials. This is a simple enough concept, but is complicated in Sputnik Sweetheart by the reoccurrence of the metaphysical. Both Sumire and Miu’s journeys are their search for their missing parts: not in the way some travel to find other aspects of themselves that they didn’t know existed, but an actual hunt for a part of themselves that separated from the original whole. Their beings were ruptured and like Peter Pan without his shadow, they are driven to finding that missing piece. 

 

Sumire first relays the idea of a separation after K admits that her changed appearance was one that he did not fully recognize. She too agrees and reveals that there is a disconnect between how she feels and the face she sees in the mirror, and muses that one half of herself could leave the other part behind. Not yet a scary idea; leaving herself behind could be in the metaphorical sense like a reinvention (which is how K interprets it). Even though the pieces are disconnected, they are still tied together by some thread, however small. 

 

While in Greece with Miu, Sumire’s two selves are actually separated. At first she just feels that they are “out of sync,” but the documents K finds shows evidence that her disappearance may have been provoked by one of her images “[breaking] through the mirror and [journeying] to the other side” (71,165). There is no clear conclusion for her story as the audience gets no explanation from her about where she went, although she does return unscarred. 

 

Miu’s journey does leave a visible trace, implying that the experience that it involved was of a more traumatic nature. There was such a clean fracture between the two sides that they almost seemed to be irreconcilable. Miu’s white hair is a symbol of her trials, and for her, dying it is a way to forget.  

Sputnik Sweetheart was an interesting choice to end travel fictions with. Although some books we read were weirder than others, this one definitely took the prize for strangest travel fiction. (Comfort of Strangers taking a close second, but it’s a different kind of weird, more shock-worthy instead of thought-provoking) In a way, although many of the themes we talked about on the first day of class were still present throughout the book (vacationing to an exotic place for an escape/break from the real world, finding yourself when vacationing, losing yourself when vacationing, being a foreigner vs. being a native, learning language…) this book was a whole different kind of travel fiction, and the real point of the book lay not in the classic clichés of travel writing but in the deeper metaphorical kind of travel. In Sputnik Sweetheart, although Miu and Sumire travel together to Greece and around Europe, and K eventually goes there as well, and Miu references trips she has made to France and other places, the real journey in this book is to the “great beyond”. Maybe this great beyond is heaven, maybe it’s hell, maybe it’s neither, and just some spiritual “place” that your soul can go without bringing your body. This isn’t a place you’d find on a map, it doesn’t have a language, or customs, or foods, or people… it’s a place you reach in your own mind. It’s where Miu went when she was stuck on that ferris wheel, its where Sumire went when she was lost all that time, and its where K went when he fainted when trying to follow the music in the middle of the night in Greece. Unfortunately, this blog post won’t contain a lot of insight, its comprised more of questions. But I think that when Murkami wrote this book, that’s what his goal was. He wasn’t trying to make some sort of spiritual point, but instead ask the questions that needed to be asked. Are the things in this book complete, utter, ridiculous fiction? Or could they actually happen to you? Could you really split into two people, watching your doppelganger through your window? Could you really feel such an extreme, tangible change in yourself overnight? Perhaps, instead of trying to answer a question, or make a point, like most authors try to do when writing (some would even say, that’s the only purpose of writing, to make some point) Murkami instead simply wants to raise our curiosity about traveling to a “spiritual” place instead of a tangible place. To me, it doesn’t seem that crazy—when we dream, we certainly enter a quite different and shocking world, where sometimes we are not ourselves… and there is no one correct scientific explanation for that. Although I myself am agnostic and don’t really believe in much of a spiritual world, this book definitely made me think twice.
By the way, sorry for the completely unorganized rant. I hope someone agrees with a couple of the points I made. Or maybe I didn't really make any.

Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart is an effective exploration of the connection between otherness, the search for identity and travel. The three main characters in the novel—the narrator (K), Sumire, and Miu—are all, in many ways, alienated from society. K notes that he was always different from his family and, because of that, took to books. Sumire, essentially embodying counter-culture, idolizes Kerouac and dropped out of college to complete her “total novel”. Miu is a Korean who grew up in Japan, never truly part of Korean or Japanese culture. They are all, in their distinct ways, outsiders. Without the guidance or cues from society, their search for self and identity has to be a mostly private and personal struggle. It is through travel that any sense of self can be understood. Yet, Murakami’s novel is unique because the characters do not only travel on a physical level; they also travel on a metaphysical, alternate-reality level. Despite the type of travel, though, otherness and the search for self always remain central ideas.
 
On the physical level, all three characters travel to an unnamed (probably fictional) island in Greece. Prior to this, Miu and Sumire have travelled around Europe for business purposes. It is in Greece that Sumire has a dream that leads to a revelation which she recounts: “I decided to make it clear to Miu what I want…I want to make love to Miu, and be held by her…It’s not too late. I have tobe with Miu, enter her” (140-141). In Japan, Sumire realized that she was in love with Miu, but in Greece that relationship takes on a physical aspect. It is only abroad that Sumire is able to understand the nuances of her feelings of Miu. Miu, herself, seems to realize her feelings for Sumire—which, though not sexual, are still loving. Again, this happens abroad. Additionally, Miu is able to accept her composed self, even though it means the loss of her sexual self. This is evidenced by her refusal to continue to dye her hair. Similarly, K is only able to experience the this-side/other-side phenomenon on the Greek island. All of the important revelations occur abroad and they all reveal precise and significant aspect of the character’s self. Sumire and Miu need each other to form some sort of identity. K, similarly, needs to experience the other-side to ever connect to Sumire again, but also to be open to duality of his person. Overall, the search for self is only accomplished through travel.
 
The other type of travel present in this novel is the movement between this-world and the other-world. This duality of worlds, along with the duality of persons, remains a central aspect of the novel. Miu recounts the tale of her night on the Ferris-wheel, watching herself make love to a man whose flirtations she tried to ignore. The next morning, she was left with only her composed self and had completely lost her free or sexual self. The composed self had grey hair and was sexually barren, in contrast to the young, adventurous other self. Sumire’s travel to the other side in order to find and possibly restore Miu’s other-self has important consequences. It is during her “travel” that she realizes her true feelings for K. As she says, “I really need you. You’re part of me; I’m part of you” (209). Without her travel to the other-side, Sumire may have never had this realization. As for Miu—she is introspective enough to realize that she simply could not manage both of her selves, so one had to leave. However, while she accepts it, she can never reconcile both selves. It is unclear why, but perhaps if she had followed Sumire to the other-side she would have been able to do so. Thus, true revelation seems to only occur during moments of travel. 
 

A thread that has been woven through almost all of the travel fictions that we have explored this semester is the connection between writing and traveling. At first it seemed a mere coincidence that characters like Kerouac’s Sal Paradise, Hemingway’s Jake and Mann’s Aschenbach were all novelists who alike desired to travel. Though the other authors hinted in this direction, Murakami seems to me to be the most direct (reviled by Kerouac, of course) about blatantly revealing why his main character finds travel so appealing and why in most cases it is necessary for a writers progression. As Sumire’s Sputnik Sweetheart Miu points out to her during their first lunch,  “At this stage in your life I don’t think you’re going to write anything worthwhile…now’s not the time. The strength you need to open that door isn’t quite there. Haven’t you ever felt that way?” (37). Sumire’s response, “Time and experience,” shows that indeed she has, and that she is cognitively aware that there is something preventing her writing from transcending from words on a page to beautiful literature.

Though Sumire dropped out of college in order to pursue her writing and has days completely devoted to it, she finds herself still unable to write works “that had both a beginning and an end” (12). This immaturity or lack of experience is expressed in several of the other novels in which the main characters struggle with how to write about a world that they are not fully engaged in. I believe Sumire’s obsession with Jack Kerouac says a lot about her feelings as both a writer and a world traveler. From the beginning of the novel it is known that everything from her clothes to her attitude is based upon his literary works and begs the question of whether she is molding her life after his in an attempt to gain literary maturation. This fixation is important to note because the mistake made by Miu in thinking that Kerouac would be called a “Sputnik” because of the literary movement he is associated with instead of “Beatnik” shapes the orbit motif that Murakami makes use of to describe Sumire’s behavior throughout the rest of the work.

Because Sumire mentions multiple times that she has no sexual desire and is relatively withdrawn from some of the most sensation based aspects of life, it is natural that she would wish to engage in experience, whatever that may be, in order to find what she is lacking. I found the desire to gain feelings and sensation to be able to better write about the world very similar to the feelings Sal Paradise expresses. His constantly mobile behavior reflects an unwillingness to sit still and a need to experience the world first hand. Because writing and reading are activities that are commonly viewed as making one absent from the world, it makes sense that all of the characters who are so engrossed in them would be need to reestablish that connection.

K even tells his audience that Sumire was “too focused on becoming a novelist to really fall for anybody,” (8). This kind of restriction is not how literature comes about. In an interview, Murakami stated, “For me, writing is like breathing. I'm always writing something…if you stop entirely, it takes a long time to get your pace back.” This suggests that writing is something that needs to be done organically and with little break; yet most of the travelers that venture from page to page in our travel fictions separate themselves from their work in order to get a better understanding of what it is actually about or, in Sumire’s case, to try to find literary maturity. Interestingly, sometimes it is immaturity or appropriately impulsiveness of a business trip turned vacation to Greece that provides the ultimate experience that even Paradise would have approved of.  

Murakami, Haruki  Sputnik Sweetheart
Sean Wilsey Talks with Haruki Murakami

Coincidentally, the passage from Sputnik Sweetheart that is used as a monologue in Nearly Famous was my favorite passage in the novel, the one that I thought most expressed the essence of the novel. 
" And it came to me then that we were wonderful travelling companions, but in the end we were no more than lonely lumps of metal in their orbits. From far off they looked like beautiful shooting stars. When the orbits of these two sattelites of ours happen to cross pasths we could be together, maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for a brief instant. The next instant we would be in absolute solitude, until we burned up and became nothing." 
Miu mentions that she discovered that the word Sputnik is Russian for " travelling companion." When Sumire dubs Miu her sputnik sweetheart, Murakami exhibits the paradoxical nature of travelling with other people. In one sense, it creates a special dynamic to have a shared experience with another person, experiencing the same environment and discovering new things together. Yet, travelling with somebody else can also be utterly lonely , and can result in further disconnection. Just like the sputnik sattelites have specific orbits of travel, they are estranged from the earth, mainly by themselves. The three main characters are all intertwined by conflicting relationships of closeness and estrangement. Sumire has an affinity for K and feels a great deal of love for him, but in the platonic, non-sexual sense. SHe feels extremely spiritually connected to him, and does not know what she would do without him. K also feels this connection and bond with Sumire, but he feels a sexual desire that she does not reciprocate, which puts a wedge between them. It is a similar situation among Sumire and Miu: Sumire feels both the platonic and sexual desire and love for Miu. Miu loves Sumire as well- there are implications that it may be more than just friendly or motherly affection- but nonetheless she cannot reciprocate the sexual desire. K fulfills his sexual desire through lascivious affairs, but in the end feels unfulfilled.Each character has an inhibition of some sort that prevents them giving themselves fully.

One of the main distinctions that the characters in Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart frequently have to make is the difference between what is real and what only seems real. For “K”, this distinction first arises after he experiences jet lag having traveled thousands of miles in a short period of time the morning after he arrives. One moment he’s sitting in a bar in Tokyo having a Canadian Club on the rocks reminiscing about his lost youth and the next he’s in a cottage on a Greek island sharing a meal with a beautiful older woman he’d met only the day before. K’s confusion, as well as the confusion of Miu and Sumire, between reality and unreality seems to be related to travel.

Miu’s experience on the Ferris wheel in a small town outside of Switzerland is one of the first examples of the magical disconnect from reality that can occur when traveling, which was hinted at by K’s jet-lag induced confusion, but not yet fully developed. On the wheel, through her binoculars, Miu saw herself in her apartment having a strange and undesirable sexual encounter with a man from the town even though she was not actually there. After reading the experience at first, I tried to make sense of it and put it in some type of psychological context instead of reading it literally, but the fact that she was found on the Ferris wheel the next morning seemed to point towards a literal interpretation. The main account of Miu’s transformation and the divide between the Miu “on this side” and the Miu “on the other side” is a key component of Sumire’s final floppy disk entry, which ends with the question, “Who in the world am I?”

Sumire’s disappearance is another mystery of travel, as she can’t be found anywhere on the island, which is not that big and the police, who know it well, can’t seem to find any clues as to where she might have disappeared to. When K gets up in the middle of the night to the Greek music coming from up in the hills, he experiences again the total dissociation of self, saying, “someone had rearranged my cells, untied the threads that held my mind together” (170). Earlier in the same thought sequence, K feels like somebody is taking his real life and stuffing it into a suitcase, which again hints at the travel theme, but the narrator never really gives us a firm understanding of why the blending of real life and the unreal occur and how they’re related to travel, but Sumire’s disappearance and her transcendental desire to “reach the other side” gives travel a bit more mystery in an age where science and technology have stripped the world of the last remnants of mystery.