Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami is a story about friendship, unrequited love and loneliness. The story revolves around three characters.

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?

The narrator, K, is in love with his best friend Sumire. The protagonist, Sumire is in love with Mia, a woman 17 years her senior who is also her boss.

We’re both looking at the same moon, in the same world. We’re connected to reality by the same line. All I have to do is quietly draw it towards me.

K and Sumire spend hours on the phones in deep conversation about life, desire, sexuality and writing. Sumire is an unconventional aspiring novelist. K is a solitary intelligent primary school teacher. K’s unrequited love roots a deep longing and loneliness in him.

Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world?

The exotic Mui employs Sumire in her wine company despite her limited skills or qualifications.  Mui has no idea Sumire is infatuated with her. 

In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.

Sumire and Mui go on a business trip. They end up on a Greek Island for a holiday after a house is offered to them over the summer by a couple of gay men they meet.

A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side.

One night K receives a distressing call from Mui imploring him to get on a plane immediately and go to the island. It is something to do with Sumire so he goes without question.

Who can really distinguish between the sea and what’s reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

This is where the novel turns into a mystery. Sumire has disappeared without a trace from the island. It seems impossible without anyone noticing anything. Enter magical realism.

Understanding is but the sum of misunderstandings.

Sputnik Sweetheart is a short, cleanly crafted, story about existence, identity, what is real and what is hidden. As is common in Japanese literature Sputnik Sweetheart is a simple story with plenty of depth.