Haruki Murakami: Sputnik Sweetheart

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.

At the time, Sumire—“Violet” in Japanese—was struggling to become a writer. No matter how many choices life might bring her way, it was novelist or nothing. Her resolve was a regular Rock of Gibraltar. Nothing could come between her and her faith in literature.

After she graduated from a public high school in Kanagawa Prefecture, she entered the liberal arts department of a cosy little private college in Tokyo. She found the college totally out of touch, a lukewarm, dispirited place, and she loathed it—and found her fellow students (which would include me, I’m afraid) hopelessly dull, second-rate specimens. Unsurprisingly, then, just before her junior year, she simply upped and left. Staying there any longer, she concluded, was a waste of time. I think it was the right move, but if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection.

Sumire was a hopeless romantic, a bit set in her ways—innocent of the ways of the world, to put a nice spin on it. Start her talking and she’d go on nonstop, but if she was with someone she didn’t get along with—most people in the world, in other words—she barely opened her mouth. She smoked too much, and you could count on her to lose her ticket every time she took the train. She’d get so engrossed in her thoughts at times she’d forget to eat, and she was as thin as one of those war orphans in an old Italian film—like a stick with eyes. I’d love to show you a photo of her, but I don’t have any. She hated having her photograph taken—no desire to leave behind for posterity a Portrait of the Artist as a Young (Wo)Man. If there were a photograph of Sumire taken at that time, I know it would provide a valuable record of how special certain people can be.

I’m getting the order of events mixed up. The woman Sumire fell in love with was named Miu. At least that’s what everyone called her. I don’t know her real name, a fact that caused problems later on, but again I’m getting ahead of myself. Miu was Korean by nationality, but she didn’t speak a word of Korean until she decided to study it when she was in her midtwenties. She was born and raised in Japan and studied at a music academy in France, so as well as Japanese she was fluent in both French and English. She always dressed well, in a refined way, with expensive yet modest accessories, and she drove a twelve-cylinder, navy-blue Jaguar.

The first time Sumire met Miu, she talked about Jack Kerouac’s novels. Sumire was absolutely nuts about Kerouac. She always had her Literary Idol of the Month, and at that point it happened to be the out-of-fashion Kerouac. She carried a dogcared copy of On the Road or Lonesome Traveler stuck in her coat pocket, thumbing through them every chance she got. Whenever she came across lines she liked, she’d mark them in pencil and commit them to memory as if they were Holy Writ. Her favourite lines were from the fire lookout section of Lonesome Traveler. Kerouac spent three lonely months in a cabin on top of a high mountain, working as a fire lookout. Sumire especially liked this part:

No man should go through life without once experiencing healthy, even bored solitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself and thereby learning his true and hidden strength.

“Don’t you just love it?” she said. “Every day you stand on top of a mountain, make a 360° sweep, checking to see if there are any fires. And that’s it. You’re done for the day. The rest of the time you can read, write, whatever you want. At night scruffy bears hang around your cabin. That’s the life!

Compared to that, studying literature in college is like biting down on the bitter end of a cucumber.”

“Okay,” I said, “but someday you’ll have to come down off that mountain.” As usual, my practical, humdrum opinions didn’t faze her.

Sumire wanted to be like a character in a Kerouac novel—wild, cool, dissolute. She’d stand around, hands shoved deep in her coat pockets, her hair an uncombed mess, staring vacantly at the sky through her black plastic-framed Dizzy Gillespie glasses, which she wore despite her 20/20 vision. She was invariably decked out in an oversized herringbone coat from a second-hand shop and a pair of rough work boots. If she’d been able to grow a beard, I’m sure she would have.

Sumire wasn’t exactly a beauty. Her cheeks were sunken, her mouth a little too wide. Her nose was on the small side and upturned. She had an expressive face and a great sense of humour, though she hardly ever laughed out loud. She was short, and even in a good mood she talked like she was half a step away from picking a fight. I never knew her to use lipstick or eyebrow pencil, and I have my doubts that she even knew bras came in different sizes. Still, Sumire had something special about her, something that drew people to her. Defining that special something isn’t easy, but when you gazed into her eyes, you could always find it, reflected deep down inside.

I might as well just come right out and say it. I was in love with Sumire. I was attracted to her from the first time we talked, and soon there was no turning back. For a long time she was the only thing I could think about. I tried to tell her how I felt, but somehow the feelings and the right words couldn’t connect. Maybe it was for the best. If I had been able to tell her my feelings, she would have just laughed at me.

While Sumire and I were friends, I went out with two or three other girls. It’s not that I don’t remember the exact number. Two, three—it depends on how you count. Add to this girls I slept with once or twice, and the list would be a little longer. Anyhow, while I made love to these other girls, I thought about Sumire. Or at least thoughts of her grazed a corner of my mind. I imagined I was holding her. Kind of a caddish thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself.