From what I’ve learned throughout my life, love deals with a variety of emotional and psychological connections. Sexual desire is a greater physical need rather than an attachment. "Sputnik Sweetheart" explores the feelings of love and lust within its pages, examining and questioning the differences within the relationships that lies between the characters and their own internal struggles.

Haruki Murakami’s "Sputnik Sweetheart" follows the Narrator “K” and his love interest “Sumire.” Sumire is a young inexperienced girl, who falls in love with “Miu.” Miu is older and is 16 years senior to Sumire. Along with the fact that Miu is already married, Miu is a Korean entrepreneur to a company that was left behind when her father passed away. She hires Sumire to be her secretary, and personal assistant of sorts, giving Sumire an opportunity to work with and to know her. Meanwhile the Narrator K is struggling with his one sided love for Sumire by having an affair with a mother of one of his students.

I think that the characters’ relationships represent the emotions of lust and love, and how the two desires can interconnect with each other. K simplifies this notion on page 134, “This woman loved Sumire, but couldn’t feel any sexual desire for her. Sumire loved this woman and desired her. I loved Sumire and felt sexual desire for her. Sumire liked me, but didn’t love me, and didn’t feel any desire for me. I felt sexual desire for a woman who will remain anonymous. But I didn’t love her.”¹It’s an odd love triangle of inner emotions and lust.

Although there is no real dire objective conflict in this novel, the development of plot and character are generally internal. The cast of characters experience many emotions in "Sputnik Sweetheart" which makes the personalities so much more believable as we experience the writing of Murakami. Love, loneliness, and lust; they’re all interconnected yet like the emotions themselves separate and unique. Loneliness can promote our minds to look for love and companionship sometimes as though it is an unquenchable thirst.

Love can be characterized as a deep emotional connection toward an individual while sexual desire is more of a physical need that one desires to fulfill. I feel that in order to truly love someone you need to have a deep understanding of him or her and if mutual, they understand and comprehend just as much about you. K feels a deep connection with Sumire and her thirst for knowledge, asking probing questions that tugged his existence.

“Who am I? What am I searching for? Where am I going? The closest I came to answering these questions was when I talked to Sumire.” He extensively goes on to elaborate how much the conversations would go:

“Unlike other people she honestly, sincerely wanted to hear what I had to say. I did my best to answer her, and our conversations helped me open up more about myself to her—and, at the same time, to myself. We used to spend hours talking. We never got tired of talking, never ran out of topics—novels, the world, scenery, language. Our conversations were more open and intimate than any lovers’.”²

This opened up K to Sumire, allowing him to fall in love with her with such deep emotional investment. Imagining what it would be like for them to actually be lovers, longing for her touch, and a lifelong future with her.

In Irving Singer’s second edition of his book "The Meaning in Life," the pursuit of love “Once we think romantically, we deploy our sexual energy toward oneness with another person in relation to whom we hope to establish a permanent bond that is not transferable to anyone else. It is as if we really were made for each other.”³

K focuses his energy and time on Sumire. He’s always trying to be there for her even when Sumire calls K in the middle of the night, asking the difference between a sign and a symbol and when she disappears on a coastal Greek island with no sign or indication of her even still being there.

He imagines having a sexual life with her but understands that she doesn’t see him as a man. So to quench his lust for Sumire, he sleeps with other women, particularly with the mother of one of his students in class. I think this is the most prevalent example of lust in the book and how it can hurt other relationships. K ends his relationship with the mother of his student “Carrot” when Carrot is caught stealing from a store. Although Carrot is a fairly normal student, well liked and not bullied, he acts out through stealing. K believes its because Carrot suspects he knows that K is sleeping with his mother. So, he breaks up with her. She begins to tell him about her troubles, how people no longer talk to her and how she feels like is turning invisible. K has nothing to really say to her. When K is dropped off he narrates; but I couldn’t love her. For whatever reason, that unconditional, natural intimacy Sumire and I had just wasn’t there. A thin, transparent veil always came between us.⁴ When K reminds the reader again of his lover, he details the warmth of her skin, a physical attribute; and almost gets back together with her but then remembers the storeroom incident with her son. When people solely have sexual desire for someone, they really only want to spend one moment and fulfill of a physical satisfaction. They don’t really consider that person valuable outside of the bedroom. The person only has a purpose of satisfying an action.

Sumire for me is the character in the center of the internal conflict that the characters go through. The events in the novel start with her falling in love for Miu, and the narrator focuses much on her for most of the novel. It’s from K that we really learn about Sumire, her personality and her character. She is an inexperienced writer who grew up without ever knowing her birth mother.

Miu and Sumire’s relationship is very complicated and perplexing. On Sumire’s side of the spectrum she has feelings for Miu. However, a part of me can’t help but feel as though Sumire is really looking for a mother figure in her life. We are told about how Sumire really knows nothing about her mother, her only memory of her mother is the scent of her skin. her father who noted to be very handsome; doesn’t tell Sumire anything about her. The similarities between Miu and Sumire’s conceptualization of her mother are comparable. Sumire didn’t develop the same handsome features as her father and notes that others compare her to him, trying to understand why Sumire didn’t grow up to be as attractive as him. But Miu doesn’t add to the negativity that Sumire instead she examines Sumire’s face.

“You’re lovely. Every bit as much as yourfather.” She reached out and, quite unaffectedly, lightlytouched Sumire’s hand that, lay on the table. “You don’t realize how very attractive you are.”⁵Which is the intial start to Sumire’s attraction to Miu.

I must be in love with this woman, she realized with a start. No mistake about it. Ice is cold; roses are red. I’m in love.⁶

And during Sumire’s dream, where she sees her mother; there is a passage that alludes to the one above when Sumire and Miu meet. In that cramped space, her mother faces outwards, towards her.She looks at Sumire’s face as if appealing to her. Sumire knows in a glance that It’s her mother.⁷While seeing a woman in a dream and knowing that its your mother, is not something that’s unusual because its your subconscious. However the similarity about Miu and Sumire’s dream is that they are both women who appreciated Sumire’s facial appearance. And Sumire meeting Miu and immediately coming to the conclusion that she in in no doubt in love after her face was complimented was a pretty important event that Murakami wanted us to remember. Other authors would have beaten around the bush and had their female protagonist really wonder if she was in love or not, Sumire is very much certain that she is and that makes the reader remember this for later.

But Miu only has nonromantic, platonic love for Sumire. Due to a traumatic event on a ferris wheel aboard she has not been able to experience any sexual desire. Though I wouldn’t say that Miu is Asexual; but an individual who cannot experience sexual attraction, as she had many partners in the past that she was attracted to.

There was a recurring metaphor in the novel that was directed towards Sumire’s inexperience and how it hampered her ability to write. That inorder to gain inexperience . It was about how China would use

At the entrance to the city they’d construct a huge gate and seal the bones up

inside. They hoped that by commemorating the dead soldiers in this way they would continue to guard their town. When the gate was finished they’d bring several dogs over to it, slit their throats, and sprinkle their blood on the gate.

Only by mixing fresh blood with the dried-out bones would the ancient souls of the dead magically revive.⁸

And it comes up two more times, once when Sumire writes that she is going to confess or act upon her feelings and the second the ending.

I spread my fingers apart and stare at the palms of both hands, looking for bloodstains. There aren’t any. No scent of blood, no stiffness. The blood must have already, in its own silent way, seeped inside.⁹

While some other readers interpreted these last lines of the book to be hinting that K either committed suicide or killed (and sexually assaulted) Sumire. I interpreted as a motif that referred to all of the characters of the book that helped K and Sumire to gain experience in lust to come for love. And that Miu and carrot’s mother are the dog and bones that were used to get there. Miu as the story stand in for the bones. when K sees Miu at the end of the book, he compares her hair to like white bones.

Leaving behind not life, but its absence. Not the warmth of something alive, but the silence of memory. Her pure-white hair inevitably made me imagine the colour of human bones, bleached by the passage of time.¹⁰

That leaves Carrot’s mother as the part about the dog. Dogs are noted to be very dependent creatures often relying on their owners. Carrot’s mother has become stressed out over her life because it seems like no one is interacting with her. I draw these characters in because they didn’t gain from the experience like Sumire and K did. K breaks up with Carrot’s mother and Sumire triggers the memories of Miu’s past.

In the ending K details that the blood must’ve seeped through. It is my belief that he is referring to the experience and maturity of the characters. Blood is a motif in the book, it is referred to again and again in objective form. I think that K and Sumire like the gates absorbed the blood or experience to finally mature and seek each other out for a relationship that centers around romantic companionship and not just around intercourse.