We each have a special something we can get only at a special time of our life. Like a small flame. A careful, fortunate few cherish that flame, nurture it, hold it as a torch to light their way. But once that flame goes out, it’s gone forever.”

I believe what Murakami does is strip life of all flamboyance and expose how mundane it really is. How personal can a connection with a stranger be when some part of him/her will always be a mystery? We can know people, yet not know them. Is love simply a dream we see to avoid the reality of our lonely existence; each life in a separate orbit? Reading Sputnik Sweetheart is like returning home. As the saying goes, you can't step in the same river twice...you can go home, but the home isn't the same home that you left. So it is with books. You can read the same words again and again, but since you are different, the book is different too. Me asomo, alzo los ojos hacia un cielo todavía oscuro. En él, no hay duda, flota una media luna de tonos enmohecidos. Con eso basta. Estamos mirando la misma luna del mismo mundo. Estamos ligados a la realidad por una sola línea.»

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If words and writing can be as realistic as it can to a point that it is so enjoyable, you just cannot do anything else but keep on reading a Murakami book. After thinking over the book over and over again for about 5 hours, I finally rated the book 3 🌟 because of the later half of the book. It was like Murakami was running out of ideas on how to finish up this book. It felt like the story turned into something that is somehow disconnected from the first half even though the three characters' lives were discussed. But it was like it was totally not required at all. The book ended up as just one average read. The ending was so rushed up where it mattered while a few unnecessary long chapters got pushed in between.

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…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 women. This was where it all began, and where it all ended. Almost.” Sumire was living in a one-room apartment in Kichijoji where she made do with the minimum amount of furniture and the maximum number of books. As a matter of fact, the characters hit home. As unpleasant and real as it sounds, two of these characters remind me so much of reality. (Moments after reading the book got me a bit high and hence the faulty rating. I needed to calm down and think about the book and decide what it made me feel in real.)

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I might be doing a disservice to Haruki Murakami with my attitude, but the desperate romantic in me, romantic in a fluffy and nausea causing way, cursed with unhealthily and unreasonably optimistic nature, just cannot help but seeing her words as a confession of the love he longs for so much and his thoughts as a belief in and acceptance of that love. Or, as someone who fears loneliness and understands it all too well, I can see it the other way. No one gets the kind of love they need and every one of the characters goes on suffering in the same closed circle, and in the end everything is the same and everyone is lonely and in pain. But I choose not to.

I changed my mind (previously I rated it 4/5 🌟). I cannot rate this book any lower. Because at many levels, I can relate so much with this book. Miu and Sumire set off on a business trip to Europe, leaving K. behind to console himself in a series of meaningless affairs. But when a distraught Miu calls K. out of the blue from a small Greek island to say that Sumire has disappeared without a trace, he drops everything and travels halfway around the world to help find her. Sputnik Sweetheart would forever be linked in my mind with an aching kind of loneliness. Like losing something you thought you owned and then realising it was never really yours. Sumire ( Millicent Wong), is an aspiring young writer drifting through life, reading, smoking and drinking coffee before sitting down to write. The great novel, sure to come… never comes. From a nearby phone box, she regularly calls, and wakes, her friend K ( Naruto Komatsu) in the early hours of the morning. K has been unrequitedly in love with her for years. At a wedding, Sumire meets the much older Miu ( Natsumi Kuroda) who inexplicably offers her a job, and Sumire soon falls into a similar unrequited love for Miu. Murakami's writing is different in the sense that this one is a little mainstream compared to his other novels. Nevertheless this book is so charming. The characters are so realistic and character development is so damn amazing.Sputnik, mi amor es mi primer acercamiento a Murakami y me ha convencido de leer más cosas entre su bibliografía. Sé y estoy seguro (por las críticas y reseñas de los demás), que no es lo mejor entre su creación literaria pero me resultó un acercamiento más que atractivo y sumamente interesan. Esta es una historia sobre el amor y la imposibilidad del mismo; el amor no correspondido y el deseo sexual presente con mucha intensidad. También sobre la soledad y el vacío que dejan las personas en la vida de los personajes. Es una historia lenta, en la que no pasa casi nada medianamente interesante solo hasta llegar a la mitad y aún así, el hilo conductor sigue llevándonos con una paciencia y una calma que no agrega alguna chicha que cause un terremoto en los conflictos de los personajes. Do let us know how you get on with with Murakami, it’s a dangerous path you are now starting on. Obsession looms just past the first turn! De esas novelas en las que no tengo mucho por decir más que esta puede resultar una historia del montón si no fuera por ese toque mágico/fantástico; lo surreal como concepto entre sus páginas. A lot of the cast’s movement is stylised, with Yuyu Rau (who later also plays K’s girlfriend Mrs Nimura) gracefully moving around the stage throughout. The almost ethereal movement adds an otherworldly dimension to the performance, also complementing suggestions of moving into different realities. Why do people have to be this lonely? What’s the point of it all? Millions of people in this world, all of them yearning, looking to others to satisfy them, yet isolating themselves. Why? Was the Earth put here just to nourish human loneliness?"