Sputnik Sweetheart

Wikipedia described the themes of Murakami's 1999 work:

'...the effects of prolonged loneliness and alienation, growing up emotionally stunted in a densely populated and overwhelmingly conformist society, and the conflict between following one's dreams and clamping down on them in order to assimilate into society. The book's major themes include loneliness and people's inability to truly know themselves or the people they love.'

You can see why it fit my train of thought.

But choosing this novel was little more than a random grab in the same library trip as Weight, and yet reading it brought that curiously narrative-like feeling to sequential events that comes from time to time.  As in Weight the idea of boundaries to our existence is dealt with again - with the fantastical rather than the mythical the prevailing mode.

Our protagonist is unusually withdrawn for Murakami.  As he says himself,

'...I'd like to take a rain check on the topic of me.  What I'd like to know more about is the objective reality of things outside myself.  How important the world outside is to me, how I maintain a sense of equilibrium by coming to terms with it.  That's how I'd grasp a clearer sense of who I am.

...

The upshot of all this is that when I was young I began to draw and invisible boundary between myself and other people.  No matter who I was dealing with, I maintained a set distance, carefully monitoring the person's attitude so that they wouldn't get any closer.' (p.60)

And the idea of one's own boundaries is central to the novel - and quickly we realise that the placement of the boundaries of self-creation do not merely have to circumnavigate the self - in some case they can run through, rather than around their creator.

Like an architect's blueprint for life, Murakami sketches in for us the lines of object and self and they are drawn throughout the work - in phone lines, flight path and ferry routes.  These lines form the scaffolds for the encounters of boundary-bubbled-selves at their vertices - with the potential for the merging of spirits, but too often characters, encased as they are, simply can't get that close.

As our protagonist recognises at the end of the novel, reaching that intersection with another individual is possible only in this realm, and our ability should be born out of gratitude:

'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 draw it towards me.' (p.229)

Like a threat hangs Sputnik in the sky - trapped in an orbit, with no hope of 'only connecting' in this way, just as Miu is trapped on her ferris wheel.

What happens when we are removed to this extent?

'It made her think of Laika, the dog.  The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outher 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?' (p.8)

With the eerie incidence of a brief temporal narrative, Weight answers for Laika, just as Sputnik Sweetheart answers for Miu, trapped looking out of her ferris wheel into the night in the same way.  The linear progression of the character is impossible for a character trapped in circular isolation. Like a multiverse theory, the potential of the character begins to break apart, never to be seen again.

Laika has stuck in my mind for a few days now, and I'd love to know more about her incidence in literature since Sputnik II was launched.  Her story is increasingly feeling like the stuff of new mythology, part of a canon which meets a global need by a newly global society.

With communications and travel bringing the world closer, there is a powerful lesson to all those, like me, marooned in suburbia (with endless rows of identical semis and terraces and high streets, certainly a 'densely populated and overwhelmingly conformist society'). We are connected to reality.  All we have to do is draw it towards us.

I love this idea - where attracting movement in  is more powerful than moving in our bubbles towards people and things.

Time to invite people to stay... :)