Sputnik Sweetheart

H a r u k i M u r a k a m i

SPUTNIK SWEETHEART

TRANSLATED FROM THE JAPANESE BY

Philip Gabriel

V

VINTAGE

Published by Vintage 2002

8 10 9 7

Copyright © Haruki Murakami 1999

English translation © Haruki Murakami 2001

Haruki Murakami has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

First published by Kodansha Ltd in 1999 with the title Sputoniku no koibito First published in Great Britain in 2001 by The Harvill Press Vintage Random House, 20 Vauxhall Bridge Road, London SW1V 2SA Random House Australia (Pty) Limited 20 Alfred Street, Milsons Point, Sydney New South Wales 2061, Australia

Random House New Zealand Limited 18 Poland Road, Glenfield, Auckland 10, New Zealand

Random House (Pty) Limited Isle of Houghton, Corner of Boundary Road & Carse O’Gowrie, Houghton 2198, South Africa

The Random House Group Limited Reg. No. 954009

www.randomhouse.co.uk/vintage

The quote from Pushkin on page 62 is from Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse, translated by Babette Deutsch (Mineola, NY: Dover publications, 1999) A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 9780099448471 (from Jan 2007)

ISBN 0099448475

Papers used by Random House are natural, recyclable products made from wood grown in sustainable forests. The manufacturing processes conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin Printed and bound in Great Britain by Bookmarque Ltd, Croydon, Surrey

Scanner’s note: the book has been proofed and formatted as a Word doc to match UK

paperback edition as closely as possible, including the use of similar fonts, headings, andparagraph spacing. Jan. 2010.

2

Sputnik Sweetheart

3

Sputnik

On 4 October 1957, the Soviet Union launched the world’s first man-made satellite, Sputnik I, from the Baikanor Space Centre in the Republic of Kazakhstan. Sputnik was 58 cm in diameter, weighed 83.6 kilograms, and orbited the Earth in 96 minutes and 12 seconds.

On 3 November of the same year, Sputnik II was successfully launched, with the dog Laika on board. Laika became the first living being to leave the Earth’s atmosphere, but the satellite was never recovered, and Laika ended up sacrificed for the sake of biological research in space.

from The Complete Chronicle of World History

4

1

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life. An intense love, a veritable tornado sweeping across the plains—flattening everything in its path, tossing things up in the air, ripping them to shreds, crushing them to bits. The tornado’s intensity doesn’t abate for a second as it blasts across the ocean, laying waste to Angkor Wat, incinerating an Indian jungle, tigers and everything, transforming itself into a Persian desert sandstorm, burying an exotic fortress city under a sea of sand. In short, a love of truly monumental proportions. The person she fell in love with happened to be 17 years older than Sumire. And was married. And, I should add, was a woman. This is where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.

*

At the time, Sumire—“Violet” in Japanese—was struggling to become a writer. No matter how many choices life might bring

5

her way, it was novelist or nothing. Her resolve was a regular Rock of Gibraltar. Nothing could come between her and her faith in literature.

After she graduated from a public high school in Kanagawa Prefecture, she entered the liberal arts department of a cosy little private college in Tokyo. She found the college totally out of touch, a lukewarm, dispirited place, and she loathed it—and found her fellow students (which would include me, I’m afraid) hopelessly dull, second-rate specimens. Unsurprisingly, then, just before her junior year, she simply upped and left. Staying there any longer, she concluded, was a waste of time. I think it was the right move, but if I can be allowed a mediocre generalization, don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection.

*