Nr. 3 (28) anul VIII / iulie-septembrie 2010 - ROMDIDAC

person who shares the same temporal and spatial plane with her? Who in
the world am I?” (SS: 170)
The two women not only share this feeling of being divided into two
separate selves, but they also experience a sense of lack, of something
missing. While Sumire struggles to be a writer, she realizes she doesn’t
possess that something needed to be a novelist. Miu, who also once longed to
become a good pianist, was struck by the fact that other fellow pianists, whose
technique was worse than hers, managed to move the audience, whereas
she couldn’t: “Slowly but surely, though, I understood - that something was
missing from me. Something absolutely critical, though I didn’t know what.”
(SS: 168) The same idea was mentioned in South of the Border, West of the
Sun, when Hajime could not indulge in Listz’s concerto even if played by an
excellent pianist; technique is meaningless if it is not accompanied by warmth
and if doesn’t help create a human connection. In fact, Sputnik Sweetheart
is mostly about incompleteness and lack of communication; K loves Sumire,
but she doesn’t like him in any sexual way. He has sexual relations with a
neighbour whom he doesn’t love. Sumire loves Miu yet Miu can’t have sexual
intercourse with her. As Toshio Kawai puts it, “everyone was like a Sputnik
going around and passing by”. 16 Theirs is a world where people are zombienatured,
where automatism feels much more natural than human bonding
and where the old mythological panorama crashed.
It is more than memory that Murakami investigates; it that deep monster
within consciousness, that absolute “whatness” that forges our being and
that is common to the archetypal soul which he stalks. At the core of all his
novels lies this genuine Freudian curiosity, a curiosity that, however, goes
beyond the mere observation of the mind. Identity issues, sexual repression,
sleep and dream might seem the subject matters of a psychology treatise;
Murakami transforms them into a treatise of the human soul. Trading in the
footsteps of Proust, he likes to unwind the thread of memory, but somehow,
an entanglement is always unavoidable. Little is left for explanations; there
are only knots whose end is never to be found.
Works Cited
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation. Trans. Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.
Dil, Jonathan. “Woman as Symptom and the Void at the Heart of Subjectivity: A
Lacanian Reading of Murakami Haruki’s ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle’ “. 30 Nov 2009,
10 April 2010 < http://www.japanesestudies.org.uk/articles/2009/Dil.html>
Kawai, Toshio. “The novels of Haruki Murakami”. The Cultural Complex:
Contemporary Jungian Perspectives on Psyche and Society. Eds. Thomas Singer,
Samuel Kimbles. New York: Brunner-Routledge, 2004.
Lane, Richard J. Jean Baudrillard. London and New York: Routledge, 2001.
Luckhurst, Roger. “Mixing memory and desire: psychoanalysis, psychology and
trauma theory”. Literary Theory and Criticism. Ed. Patricia Waugh. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006.
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