Sputnik Sweetheart

Sputnik Sweetheart is a slender, haunting novel about longing that can never quite reach its object, three people orbiting one another like lonely satellites. K, a young Tokyo schoolteacher, is quietly, hopelessly in love with his closest friend Sumire, a fierce and disheveled aspiring novelist who does not love him back.

Then Sumire meets Miu, an elegant, worldly businesswoman seventeen years her senior, and falls in love for the first time. She abandons her chaotic writer's life to work for Miu, and the two travel through Europe until they reach a small Greek island. There, one night, Sumire vanishes without a trace, as if she had slipped through a crack in the world. K is summoned to help search, and what he finds instead are cryptic writings, a decades-old trauma, and visions that blur the line between this world and some other.

Spare and dreamlike, Sputnik Sweetheart distills Murakami's abiding themes, isolation, desire, and the porous border between reality and the uncanny, into one of his most quietly devastating books. It is a story about the distances between people who love one another, and the strange places that distance can lead.