Sputnik Sweetheart What Happened To Miu
Harald Atta
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 until she decided to study Korean when she was in her mid-twenties, she didn't speak a word of the language. She was born and raised in Japan and studied at a music academy in France, so she was fluent in both French and English in addition to Japanese. 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 to her 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 dog-eared copy of On the Road or Lonesome Traveler stuck in her coat pocket, thumbing through it every chance she got. Whenever she ran across lines she liked, she'd mark them in pencil and commit them to memory like they were Holy Writ. Her favorite 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 boredsolitude in the wilderness, finding himself depending solely on himself andthereby 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 three-hundred-sixty-degree sweep, checking to see if there're 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 with that, studying literature in college is like chomping down on the bitter end of a cucumber."
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 humor, 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.
Sumire couldn't figure out what she meant. Knife and fork poised in midair, she gave it some thought. "Sputnik? You mean the first satellite the Soviets sent up, in the fifties? Jack Kerouac was an American novelist. I guess they do overlap in terms of generation. . . ."
Miu lightly dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a napkin. "Beatnik-Sputnik. I never can remember those kinds of terms. It's like the Kenmun Restoration or the Treaty of Rapallo. Ancient history."
Miu smiled. A nostalgic, intimate smile, like a treasured old possession pulled out of the back of a drawer. Her eyes narrowed in an utterly charming way. She reached out and, with her long, slim fingers, gently mussed Sumire's already tousled hair. It was such a sudden yet natural gesture that Sumire could only return the smile.
Ever since that day, Sumire's private name for Miu was Sputnik Sweetheart. Sumire loved the sound of it. It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could the dog possibly be looking at?
In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, like she was crossing a field and bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something akin to an artistic revelation. Which is why, at that point, it didn't matter to Sumire that the person she fell in love with happened to be a woman.
She scrutinized me for a while, like I was some machine run by a heretofore unheard-of power source. Losing interest, she stared up at the ceiling, and the conversation petered out. No use talking to him about that, she must have decided.
Sumire was born in Chigasaki. Her home was near the seashore, and she grew up with the dry sound of sand-filled wind blowing against her windows. Her father ran a dental clinic in Yokohama. He was remarkably handsome, his well-formed nose reminding you of Gregory Peck in Spellbound. Sumire didn't inherit that handsome nose, nor, according to her, did her brother. Sumire found it amazing that the genes that produced that nose had disappeared. If they really were buried forever at the bottom of the gene pool, the world was a sadder place. That's how wonderful this nose was.
Sumire's father remarried when she was six, and two years later her younger brother was born. Her new mother wasn't pretty either. On top of which she wasn't so good at remembering things, and her handwriting wasn't any great shakes. She was a kind and fair person, though. That was a lucky thing for little Sumire, the brand-new stepdaughter. No, lucky isn't the right word. After all, her father had chosen the woman. He might not have been the ideal father, but when it came to choosing a mate, he knew what he was doing.
Sumire is an aspiring writer who survives on a family stipend and the creative input of her only friend, the novel's male narrator and protagonist, known in the text only as 'K'. K is an elementary school teacher, 25 years old, and in love with Sumire, though she does not quite share his feelings. At a wedding, Sumire meets an ethnic Korean woman, Miu, who is 17 years her senior. The two strike up a conversation and Sumire finds herself attracted to the older woman. This is the first time she has ever been sexually drawn to anybody. Miu soon asks Sumire to come work for her. This meeting and the ensuing relationship between the women leads to Sumire changing: she starts wearing nicer clothes, gets a better apartment, and quits smoking; however, she also develops a writer's block.
K suddenly begins to receive letters from Europe written by Sumire. With them, he is able to track Sumire's and Miu's business travels across the continent. In her last letter, Sumire mentions that instead of coming home as originally planned, she and Miu are to spend some extra time on a Greek island vacationing.
After a short while, K begins to call Sumire's house wondering when she will return. The only answer he gets, however, is from her answering machine. He soon gets a surprising call from Miu, who asks him to fly to Greece and mentions that something has happened to Sumire. Miu doesn't explain much, but it's clear the matter is urgent. The connection is shabby, and their phone connection is soon lost.
K's new school year is starting the week after Miu's call, but finding Sumire's well-being more important, he leaves for Greece the next day. He meets Miu for the first time, and she tells him that Sumire has vanished without a trace. She tells him about the string of events that led to the point of Sumire's disappearance, in which Miu was unable to reciprocate physically when Sumire initiated a sexual encounter. Miu is very pleased to have K around, but worries that Sumire may have committed suicide; K reassures her that Sumire would not do that.
Miu leaves the island for Athens in order to get help from the Japanese embassy and to call Sumire's parents. K spends a day on the island thinking about Sumire and her fate, coming to a realization that there might be some clue in Sumire's writing that Miu mentioned. He finds Sumire's computer and a floppy disk that contains two documents, named simply "Document 1" and "Document 2". One contains Sumire's writing about a dream of hers in which she tries and fails to reach a version of her mother, who died when Sumire was young. The other is a story that Miu told her about an event that transformed her 14 years ago. She was trapped in a Ferris wheel overnight and, using her binoculars to see inside her nearby apartment, witnessed another version of herself having a disturbing sexual encounter with a man. The event caused her hair to turn completely white and divested her of sexual urges. Miu says that she feels that she was split in two on that night, and has lost that other part of herself forever. Trying hard to connect the dots, K concludes that both the stories suggest the existence of multiple worlds, and Sumire has left this world and entered a parallel one, perhaps to be with the other version of Miu. He then has a mystical experience during the night.
He continues with his solitary life. Despite their promises to the contrary, he never sees Miu again except for one chance encounter: Miu drives past him in her Jaguar but doesn't seem to acknowledge he is there. She has stopped dyeing her hair, and it is now pure white. K senses she is now an "empty shell," lacking what both Sumire and K were once drawn to about her.
Without warning, K receives a phone call from Sumire, who tells him that she is in the same phone booth near her apartment that she had always called him from. She asks him to come to get her from the phone booth. As with other Murakami works, Sputnik Sweetheart lacks a clear, concise ending.
c80f0f1006