And there he discovers two documents on her computer, one of which reveals a chilling secret about Sumire's lover. The narrator, a schoolteacher identified only as K. Sumire is suddenly smitten with a sophisticated businesswoman and accompanies her love object to Europe where, on a tiny Greek island, she disappears 'like smoke.' The schoolteacher hastens to the island in search of his friend. Murakamis new novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, his seventh to be translated into English, offers an eerie variation on his favorite theme. The narrator is a teacher whose only close friend is Sumire, an aspiring young novelist with chronic writer's block. 'We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept from one kind of oblivion to another.' 'There was nothing solid we could depend on,' the reader is told. Shorter than the sweeping Wind-up Bird Chronicle, less playfully bizarre than A Wild Sheep Chase, the author's seventh novel distills his signature themes into a powerful story about the loneliness of the human condition. Sputnik Sweetheart finds Haruki Murakami in his minimalist mode. Then a desperate Miu calls from a small Greek island and asks for his help, and he discovers something very strange has happened to Sumire.

rustrated in his own love for Sumire, K consoles himself by having an affair with the mother of one of his pupils. Surprised that she might, after all, be a lesbian, Sumire spends hours on the phone talking to her best friend K about the big questions in life: what is sexual desire and should she ever tell Miu how she feels for her.

He is also responsible for translating the works of such luminaries like Scott Fitzgerald, John Irving and Raymond Carver and considers the latter as being his teacher and literary mentor. But whereas Miu is glamorous and successful, Sumire is an aspiring writer who dresses in an oversized second-hand coat and heavy boots like a character in a Kerouac novel. In addition to writing, Murakami is a dedicated runner who has taken part in around twenty marathons and trains every single day. Twenty two year old Sumire is in love with a woman seventeen years her senior.

Sumire murakami