Haruki Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart

Let me get back to how Sumire and Miu met.

Miu had heard of Jack Kerouac and had a vague sense that he was a novelist of some kind. What kind of novelist, though, she couldn’t recall. “Kerouac… hmm… Wasn’t he a Sputnik?”

Sumire couldn’t work out what she meant. Knife and fork poised in mid-air, she gave it some thought. “Sputnik? You mean the first satellite the Soviets sent up, in the fifties? Jack Kerouac was an American novelist. I guess they do overlap in terms of generation…”

“Isn’t that what they called the writers back then?” Miu asked. She traced a circle on the table with her fingertip, as if rummaging through some special jar full of memories.

“Sputnik…?”

“The name of a literary movement. You know—how they classify writers in various schools of writing. Like Shiga Naoya was in the White Birch School.”

Finally it dawned on Sumire. “Beatnik!”

Miu lightly dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

“Beatnik—Sputnik. I never can remember those kinds of terms. It’s like the Kenmun Restoration or the Treaty of Rapallo. Ancient history.”

A gentle silence descended on them, suggestive of the flow of time.

“The Treaty of Rapallo?” Sumire asked.

Miu smiled. A nostalgic, intimate smile, like a treasured old possession pulled out of the back of a drawer. Her eyes narrowed in an utterly charming way. She reached out and, with her long, slim fingers, gently ruffled Sumire’s already tousled hair. It was such a sudden yet natural gesture that Sumire could only return the smile.

Ever since that day, Sumire’s private name for Miu was Sputnik Sweetheart. She loved the sound of it. It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?

This Sputnik conversation took place at a wedding reception for Sumire’s cousin at a posh hotel in Akasaka. Sumire wasn’t particularly close to her cousin; in fact they didn’t get along at all. She’d just as soon be tortured as attend one of these receptions, but she couldn’t back out of this one. She and Miu were seated next to each other at one of the tables. Miu didn’t go into all the details, but it seemed she’d taught Sumire’s cousin the piano—or something along those lines—when she was taking the entrance exams for the university music department. It wasn’t a long or very close relationship, clearly, but Miu felt obliged to attend.

In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, as if she were crossing a field when bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something like an artistic revelation. Which is why, at that point, it didn’t matter to Sumire that the person she fell in love with happened to be a woman. I don’t think Sumire ever had what you’d call a lover. In high school she had a few boyfriends, guys she’d go to the cinema with, go swimming with. I couldn’t picture any of those relations ever getting very deep. Sumire was too focused on becoming a novelist to really fall for anybody. If she did experience sex—or something close to it—in high school, I’m sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

“To be perfectly frank, sexual desire has me baffled,” she once told me, making a sober face. This was just before she left college, I believe; she’d downed five banana daiquiris and was pretty drunk. “You know—how it all comes about. What’s your take on it?”

“Sexual desire’s not something you understand,” I said, giving my usual middle-of-the-road opinion. “It’s just there.”

She scrutinized me for a while, as if I were some machine running on a previously unheard-of power source. Losing interest, she stared up at the ceiling, and the conversation petered out. No use talking to him about that, she must have decided.

Sumire was born in Chigasaki. Her home was near the seashore, and she grew up with the dry sound of sand-filled wind blowing against her windows. Her father ran a dental clinic in Yokohama. He was remarkably handsome, his wellformed nose reminding you of Gregory Peck in Spellbound. Sumire didn’t inherit that handsome nose, nor, according to her, did her brother. She found it amazing that the genes that had produced that nose had disappeared. If they really were buried for ever at the bottom of the gene pool, the world was a sadder place. That’s how wonderful this nose was.

Sumire’s father was an almost mythic figure to the women in the Yokohama area who needed dental care. In the examination room he always wore a surgical cap and large mask, so the only thing the patient could see was a pair of eyes and ears. Even so, it was obvious how attractive he was. His beautiful, manly nose swelled up suggestively from under the mask, making his female patients blush. In an instant—regardless of whether their dental plan covered the costs—they fell in love.

Sumire’s mother passed away from a congenital heart defect when she was just 31. Sumire hadn’t quite turned three. The only memory she had of her mother was a vague one of the scent of her skin. Just a couple of photographs of her remained—a posed photo taken at her wedding, and a snapshot taken immediately after Sumire was born. Sumire used to pull out the photo album and gaze at the pictures. Sumire’s mother was—to put it mildly—a completely forgettable person. A short, humdrum hairstyle, clothes that made you wonder what she could have been thinking, an ill-atease smile. If she’d taken one step back, she would have melted right into the wall. Sumire was determined to brand her mother’s face on her memory. Then someday she might meet her in her dreams. They’d shake hands, have a nice chat. But things weren’t that easy. Try as she might to remember her mother’s face, it soon faded. Forget about dreams—if Sumire had passed her mother on the street, in broad daylight, she wouldn’t have known her.

Sumire’s father hardly ever spoke of his late wife. He wasn’t a talkative man to begin with, and in all aspects of life—as though it were a kind of mouth infection he wanted to avoid catching—he never talked about his feelings. Sumire had no memory of ever asking her father about her dead mother. Except for once, when she was still very small, for some reason she asked him, “What was my mother like?” She remembered this conversation very clearly.

Her father looked away and thought for a moment before replying. “She was good at remembering, things,” he said.

“And she had nice handwriting.”

A strange way to describe someone. Sumire was waiting expectantly, the snow-white first page of her notebook open, for nourishing words that could have been a source of warmth and comfort—a pillar, an axis, to help prop up her uncertain life here on this third planet from the sun. Her father should have said something that his young daughter could have held on to. But Surnire’s handsome father wasn’t going to speak those words, the very words she needed most.

Sumire’s father remarried when she was six, and two years later her younger brother was born. Her new mother wasn’t pretty either. On top of which she wasn’t so good at remembering things, and her handwriting wasn’t any great shakes. She was a kind and fair person, though. That was a lucky thing for little Sumire, her brand-new stepdaughter. No, lucky isn’t the right word. After all, her father had chosen the woman. He might not have been the ideal father, but when it came to choosing a mate, he knew what he was doing.