Sputnik Sweetheart

About this book

Combining the early straightforward seductions of Norwegian Wood and the complex mysteries of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle this new novelhis seventh translated into Englishis Haruki Murakami at his most satisfying and representative best. The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitmentsuntil she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakamis surreal yet humane universe to which she serves as guide both for us and for her frustrated suitor now a teacher. In the course of her travels from parochial Japan through Europe and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece she disappears without a trace leaving only lineaments of her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. The teacher summoned to assist in the search for her experiences his own ominous haunting visions which lead him nowhere but home to Japanand there under the expanse of deep space and the still-orbiting Sputnik he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved. A love story a missing-person story a detective storyall enveloped in a philosophical mysteryand finally a profound meditation on human longing.