Product Description
Haruki Murakami, the internationally bestselling author of Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, plunges us into an urbane Japan of jazz bars, coffee shops, Jack Kerouac, and the Beatles to tell this story of a tangled triangle of uniquely unrequited loves.

A college student, identified only as “K,” falls in love with his classmate, Sumire. But devotion to an untidy writerly life precludes her from any personal commitments–until she meets Miu, an older and much more sophisticated businesswoman. When Sumire disappears from an island off the coast of Greece, “K” is solicited to join the search party and finds himself drawn back into her world and beset by ominous, haunting visions. A love story combined with a detective story, Sputnik Sweetheart ultimately lingers in the mind as a profound meditation on human longing.

Amazon.com Review
Sputnik Sweetheart finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Shorter than the sweeping Wind-up Bird Chronicle, less playfully bizarre than A Wild Sheep Chase, the author's seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. "There was nothing solid we could depend on," the reader is told. "We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another."

The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer's block. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears "like smoke." The schoolteacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire's lover.

Sputnik Sweetheart is a melancholy love story, and its deceptively simple prose is saturated with sadness. Characters struggle to connect with one another but never quite succeed. Like the satellite of the title they are essentially alone. And by toning down the pyrotechnics of his earlier work, Murakami has created a world that is simultaneously mundane and disturbing--where doppelgängers and vanishing cats produce a pervasive atmosphere of alienation, and identity itself seems like a terribly fragile thing. --Simon Leake

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 4.0 based on 82 reviews)

Don't Bother With This One....

I love Murakami's novels and short stories, but this one just didn't do it for me. This story should have been a novella or part of Murakami's short collections. It's not a bad or uninteresting read, there's just a ton of padding. By the time I got through the filler and to the crucial points, I had already guessed the twists. Not a bad introduction for those readers new to Murakami (even though you're still better off starting with 'After the Quake', 'Elephant Vanishes' or 'Norwegian Wood'), but if you've read the bulk of his work than skip this.
October 05, 2008

Lonely but Lucky

This is not a sappy tale about unrequited love. Instead, Murakami casts a positive light on a frustrating friendship and an ethereal connection that are very real. His characters endure uncontrollable forces that drive eerie encounters and realizations. And the reader grasps that a feeling or memory of love, however fulfilled or unfulfilled, remains a source of motivation.
September 12, 2008

sputnik sweethearrt

This is a really really good novel.I highly recommend it. The story is about a triangle relationship. It's really cool.
June 14, 2008

Good Murakami - but not among his best

This good novel by Japan's Haruki Murakami has essentially three characters: the narrator, a teacher in his late twenties (a Murakami alter ego, one supposes); the object of his affections, Sumire, an erratic writer in her early twenties; and the object of Sumire's affections: Miu, a married businesswoman in her late thirties with a secret past, that takes Sumire as an assistant and as the companion in an eventful trip to a Greek island. The novel finishes with too many loose ends (at least, I did not understand them), but for most of the times the mixture of existentialism and minimalism, along with Murakami's good grip as a narrator makes one interest hold. Not among the author's best, but still a good novel about the loneliness and despair of modern urban life.
March 22, 2008

like a chrome-plated Alice

A story of wistful beauty, love, and longing. A strange "through the looking glass" tale, told from a unique perspective. Not only was this a beautiful piece of writing, but it was full of things I love - lesbians, unrequited love, Beatniks, magic... Also, it didn't read at all like a translation, which really impressed me.

"And 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 absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing."
January 02, 2008

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