May 29 2008
Murakami or the story that never was
I finished reading Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik, sweetheart in Spanish, as I still can’t read Japanese (or understand it for that matter). I cannot say I did not like it. I did. Yet, there is something missing in his writing (or should we say traduttore, traditore was more to blame here?). The story in itself is interesting, a typical triangle of love (oh, don’t you love number three? who was not in one of those little stories him/herself at least once in life?) between two women and a man. The narrator loves Sumire who loves Myû and so on and so forth. No, don’t expect raw sex bursting out from the pages à la Ian McEwan in Atonement. But you should, by all means, expect sexual tension. Sumire at times seems a typical lost soul, one of those we would all love to take home and feed on a daily basis, take care of, and read to at night before tucking her in. However, there is this darkness about her, emanating from her own suffering as a struggling writer/woman in this world. Yes, writers, we’ve all been there, or we may still be. The narrator is a schoolteacher with a sex life, in spite of his undying love for the protagonist. At a given moment, Myû comes along and disrupts the love flow between narrator and Sumire (narrator giving, Sumire receiving — oh, heterosexual males, have you not suffered at the hands of little girls who just don’t know what the hell is going on?) . All of a sudden, Sumire, who had felt no hunger for human flesh until that point, begins to yearn for Myû. So far, so good.
Now, I won’t tell the rest of the story because I could be sued, but it is in what I consider to be the book’s climax that the pile of cards crumbles before us, and it really doesn’t get together again. There is something there that simply does not happen, something I lost as a reader. It is universally acknowledged that Murakami looks simple, but he is indeed complex. To be honest, I am not really sure. This is one of the possibilities of literature, we simply can decide that someone is complex or that he just digressed from the core of his own artistic work. We can hail him as a genius — he might be, I’m just a poor amateur — or destroy him because he could not really grasp his own essence. But, isn’t it what literature is all about?
