SPUTNIK SWEETHEART
By HARUKI MURAKAMI
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. 224 pages, $23

Sputnik Sweetheart, Haruki Murakami's latest novel to be translated into English, should please the many American fans of this author, who is both popular and brilliant. Murakami's best work includes the imaginative Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and the soaringly ambitious Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. In this new book, Murakami plays intriguing variations on many of his trademark themes. These include detachment, obsession, and the search for love in an alienating urban environment, all wrapped within a framework that has been variously described by critics as "magical realist," "postmodern," or "minimalist."
In fact, one of Murakami's greatest appeals is probably the old-fashioned but deeply satisfying blend of romanticism, pathos, and humor that surrounds his (usually) appealing characters, caught in suspenseful or mystery-laden situations that only abiding love and loyalty can carry them through. Murakami takes emotions, especially love, seriously, and his characters' quests for love through fantastic labyrinths of the mind and the soul are treated with sympathy and gravity. All of these characteristics are on display in Sputnik Sweetheart.

The story itself is a relatively simple one. Narrated by an unnamed male protagonist, the novel recounts the protagonist's unrequited love for a young woman, a would-be writer named Sumire. Although appreciating the narrator as a supportive friend, Sumire discovers that the real love of her life is Miu, a beautiful and mysterious older businesswoman who hires Sumire as her assistant and takes her on a business trip to Europe, which ultimately turns into a vacation on a Greek island. In the middle of this apparently idyllic holiday, however, Sumire disappears without a trace. Summoned from Tokyo by a phone call from Miu, the narrator travels to Greece. In the novel's most intriguing section, the protagonist discovers not the corporeal Sumire, but perhaps an aspect of the truth behind her disappearance. He also becomes aware of a variety of stories about Miu's past which in turn reveal, or at least suggest, further twists in the labyrinth of the human condition and the impossibility of genuine knowledge about either oneself or another person.
Readers knowledgeable about Murakami will already detect a number of familiar tropes and themes from the above description. The characters are very much stock Murakami figures: the anonymous, rather feckless narrator eking out a banal existence, the unattainable woman who remains-despite some irritating characteristics-the sole object of the protagonist's desire, and the mysterious older woman who, for a time at least, takes control of other characters' lives but has a dark past of her own. Also familiar is the crucial role that female characters play in the narrative. As in many other of Murakami's works, the female characters are the conduits to an Other world of magic, mystery, and passion.
Other aspects of the novel are more unusual, however. Sumire's (unrequited) homoerotic attraction to Miu is the first incidence of lesbian sexuality that I am aware of in any Murakami work. The homoerotic relationship underlines the impossibility of the narrator's desire for Sumire, but it does not really contribute any added dimension to her character. More genuinely fresh and interesting is the novel's European setting, employed in most of the later scenes. A tour de force sequence involving Miu's imprisonment on a Ferris wheel in a French village and what she sees from the top of the Ferris wheel seamlessly interweaves European motifs with more otherworldly elements to provide a disturbing vision of a divided self. Murakami himself has lived in Europe, and he studied Greek tragedy as an undergraduate; but the mixture of magic and menace that underlines the Greek island sojourn is perhaps most reminiscent of John Fowles's novel The Magus. In particular, a scene in which mysterious music lures the protagonist out for a moonlight walk evokes the sense of the fantastic pervading the quotidian that is a hallmark of Fowles's book.
That said, it must be acknowledged that this new work of Murakami's is less complex and compelling than either The Magus or some of his own earlier novels. Although the characters are appealing and the narrative intriguing, there are only a few scenes (mainly the European ones), that rise to the level of uncanny wondrousness that is such a crucial aspect of Murakami's best work. In Sputnik Sweetheart, Murakami maintains his reputation as a superbly accomplished and imaginative writer, but does not achieve either the depth or the ambition of his greatest works.

Susan J. Napier, professor of Japanese literature and culture at the University of Texas, is the author of Escape from the Wasteland: Romanticism and Realism in the Works of Mishima Yukio and Oe Kenzaburo; The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity; and the recently published Anime from Akira to Princess Mononoke: Experiencing Japanese Animation.