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Lost in Denial: Murakami’s “Sputnik Sweetheart”
Compartmentalizing thoughts and emotions to suppress elements of each is a common strategy used to deal with difficult situations. Haruki Murakami illustrates this natural defense mechanism in Sputnik Sweetheart with each of his three main characters. Murakami makes his readers consider the results of taking denial to its extreme: splitting into two and disappearing to another world.
It is through the history and character of Miu that Murakami exposes the complexity of suppressing. Miu is introduced as a simple character, the love interest of protagonist Sumire. It is through the examination of her history that her importance is revealed to the reader. From the locked cart of a carnival Ferris wheel Miu looks into her apartment and sees herself having sex with her gentleman caller Ferdinando. In her accounts she villainizes Ferdinando as the aggressor of a horrific sexual perversion. But through analyzing subtleties in the text it is not farfetched to reach the conclusion Miu only blames herself. Miu was uneasy about a reality in which she was attracted to the man she identified as “a threat to her peaceful life” (146).
Miu’s discomfort originated from her internal system of defense mechanisms she used to protect herself from emotional harm. In place of personal relationships she absorbed herself in her music. Though promiscuous she was “too used to being too strong” and “never once did I truly love someone” (169). The implications of carrying on a formal relationship with the handsome Spaniard terrified her. This fear caused her to strengthen her walls: in addition to denying her attraction to Ferdinando until she believed it did not exist she renounced her attraction to the cozy Swiss town she had adored, her passion for food, her ability to sleep (147). Even her grip on reality faltered as she suspected her lover of stalking her and making late night calls to her apartment.
Miu’s repression clouded the fact that she was meeting Ferdinando and he was not only calling her apartment, but also having conversations with her and spending time with her, even having sex with her. Feeling guilty for carrying on a relationship she denied it was taking place and suppressed her passion for everything. Over time, Miu’s excessive use of compartmentalization and denial transformed her into a representation of this denial and its results.
Miu’s severe denial goes beyond the depression and/or insanity one might experience in reality outside the novel. She bottles her emotions and stores them not in a different internal compartment, but in a wholly different location. “With me locked inside the Ferris wheel, he did whatever he wanted - to the me over there” (156). Miu places the part of herself that is revolted by her sexual partnership outside of herself. This dispassionate Miu materializes in the distant Ferris wheel cart and ponders this seemingly sudden separation. She realizes that she and the Miu left in the apartment did not feel the same way about the actions occurring within the apartment.
With this realization Miu says: “in the end it wasn’t Ferdinando anymore. Or maybe from the beginning it wasn’t him” (156). This is where Miu’s emotional split is finalized by her physical one. She implies with her references of Ferdinando that in the end it was not her anymore. That it never was. Instead of distancing her negative emotions concerning her relationship as she had intended, her consciousness remains with those negative emotions and she entirely rejects her sexual desires, her sexuality, even the color of her hair. She wakes not in the throes of passion with her lover but is instead found alone on the Ferris wheel.
When one sees this character - the resulting Miu that participates in the plot of the novel - as a consequence of simple denial, the implications of her condition will disorient any reader. “I was still on this side, here. But another me, maybe half of me, had gone over to the other side… it all still exists, on the other side. Just a single mirror separates us… but I can never cross that boundary of that single pane of glass” (157). The reader is led to question whether “me” is referring to Miu, or if Murakami is really asking his readers to identify the “mes” within themselves. He then encourages them to share Miu’s ultimate struggle - “which me, on which side of the mirror, is the real me?” (157).
The disorienting struggle of understanding a reality in which parts of one’s self disappear and questioning whether the feelings one denies are lost forever or are waiting on some “other side” is augmented when it is experienced by the novel’s other characters: particularly when Sumire loses the part of herself that resides on the side visible to both the reader and the other characters (165). “Sumire went over to the other side” and left her friends (and the readers) behind to ponder their own existences in the most logical way they know how: with complete confusion.
Sumire’s disappearance is the polar companion of Miu’s loss of her passionate self. As Miu neared her crossover point she lost sight of sexual passion, whereas Sumire started out void of sexual passion and then developed a passion that only increased as she approached her disappearance. And though Sumire is introduced as a fervent writer who loses her ability to write as the story progresses, Sumire writes again just before she disappears (163). It is in the written works she leaves behind that she alludes to the catalyst of her ultimate disappearance: her unrequited love for Miu
Sumire decides to stop repressing her love for and attraction to Miu. “Act that way and slowly but surely I will fade away. All the dawns and twilights will rob me, piece by peace, of myself, and before long… I would end up nothing” (140). Sumire recognizes the parts of herself she has lost in order to maintain this state of denial. She had become the girl in the Ferris wheel: “I’ve already surrendered so much that’s important to me. There’s nothing more I can give up” (141). But unlike Miu, who denied her passions until they had disappeared, Sumire renounces her denial and physically expresses her true feelings. When Miu is unable to accept Sumire’s sexual advances Sumire realizes she cannot live in the dispassionate state of the Ferris wheel environment and follows her desires to the other side of the mirror just as she had unknowingly predicted. “And if Miu doesn’t accept me, then what? … I’ll cross that bridge when the time comes” (165).
If Miu had seen into the other side and Sumire had crossed over into it, the narrator was straddling the boundary between the two sides. Telling the story with the voice of the character that is neither here nor there adds to the readers’ disorientation as they try to understand the significance of denial and disappearance in relation to the plot and their own lives. K is drawn from his bed by the sound of music, which he follows into the night. For some reason he knows “at this very moment, Sumire was listening to the same music” (169). At this point K both wants to see what is happening and keep his distance as he is propelled by what feels like a dream. By keeping his distance from the origin of the music and the side of passion K is permanently fastened into the world he had been holding closest to, the dispassionate world off denial.
K had been in love with Sumire since the beginning of the novel, and while he repressed his emotions throughout he did not deny them, but shared them with the reader. This kept him straddling the line between worlds, always feeling out of place. By holding back the impulse to follow the music “the strange sense of alienation I’d felt inside had vanished… No sense of being out of place” (171). K returns to the cottage and the metaphorical Ferris wheel cart. “Before I knew it, the world around me was drained of color” (176). It was Sumire that had kept K on the edge of the boundary, “kept me tethered to the world” (177). With Sumire gone K dreams of finding the other side, but admits “the truth is I really don’t want to escape” (178). He already knows he was on the edge and had chosen to turn back. And by making that choice “I’ll be a different person, never again the person I was… On the outside nothing will be different. But something inside me is gone. Head down, without a word, that something makes its exit” (179). That something is the edge he held onto and the option to pick sides.
Murakami offers his final twist to the challenge of understanding denial and the worlds it can lead to when K later picks up his phone: “‘Hey, I’m back,’ Sumire said. Very Casual. Very real” (208). If “one of the principles of reality is accepting things that are hard to comprehend and leaving them that way” then the reader can easily accept that Sumire has returned to this world from the other side (136). But it still is not clear which world is which - and nowhere in the text does Murakami reveal which me is the right me. The boundaries between Murakami’s fiction and real life muddle in accordance with his characters and the worlds they struggle to understand.