Sputnik Sweetheart

Author: Haruki Murakami

Rating: ⭐ 5/5

Date Read: 2016/11/28

Pages: 210

Reading Murakami is a lot like visiting your home town after many years away. There’s a sense of uncanny familiarity to the whole thing. You navigate the streets on instinct, your eyes drawn to the buildings and businesses that weren’t there before. Part of you becomes irrationally upset that the current residents would do such a thing without consulting you. Another part of you berates yourself for engaging in nostalgia-driven solipsism.

If you find yourself stopping at the liquor store to check whether they’ve started carrying Cutty Sark, or gazing at the sky to make sure there’s only one moon, then you’re in Murakami territory.

Sputnik Sweetheart is a love story. Kind of. It’s also a mystery. Sort of. Murakami ticks many of the boxes he usually ticks: quotidian narrator, ordinary girl unknowingly turned extraordinary ingenue, classical music, cats. However, this particular book is different from the others, at times a little more raw, at other times a little more restrained. There’s a lyrical quality that I previously associated with his short stories, a Nabokovesque elegance that reminds me why I count Murakami among my favorite writers.

This review is somewhat useless, isn’t it? But isn’t art? I haven’t really told you anything useful about the book, really, but I think I’ve told you all you need to know.