When you visit, now, you’ll find empty spaces in walls with the shadows of paintings, and frames with nothing in them. The museum has an interesting history: beginning with Gardner’s will for the building to never change after her death, and later involving a theft in the 1990’s. I wrote about a girl with brown hair that I once walked through the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum with. What did you write when you last wrote about someone you know? For me, it was during the last snowstorm, and I was in my room, watching the spotted darkness pass over my window.
These images set the tone of the story early on, and we watch as the characters pass out of each other’s lives. When thinking of the same little satellite, the narrator pictures the dog gazing out into the “infinite loneliness of space”, looking for something in the blackness. The word “Sputnik” enters the story from a miscommunication between Miu and Sumire, and is lovingly used to refer to Miu.
The Sputnik referred to in the story is Sputnik 2, a Russian satellite that was launched into orbit in 1957 with a dog named Laika as its passenger. In the next instant we’d be in absolute solitude. But that was only for the briefest moment. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they’re nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. They are all intimate with one another in different ways, but between each of them, an uncrossible distance remains: The narrator, who is in love with Sumire, watches as she falls in love with an older woman named Miu, who she refers to as her “Sputnik Sweetheart”. In Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart, every character is a satellite- a small, metal object, hurling through the emptiness of space. Or standing on some towering building and looking for the small shape of a place I know.ĭo you think of someone particular when you hear that word? Or is it a place that you haven’t been? I imagine hands reaching toward one another, their skin never touching. When you think of the word “Longing”, what do you think about? Spoiler Alert: this post is about the book Sputnik Sweetheart, and contains important plot points from it.
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