The Familiarity of the Unknown

Japan

Travel essays used to be about foreign lands and crazy experiences that seemed far-fetched and exotic. However, just as Gabriel quotes Blanton in “Back to the unfamiliar; The Travel Writings of Murakami Haruki”, travel writing today is “post-tourism travel writing”, things are no longer written in order to inspire travel. Instead today, travel novels are meant either as collections of anecdotes, such as the books by Bill Bryson are, or as social commentary about either the society of the traveler or the new location. The fanciful, sugarcoated, awe-inspiring imagery of travel fiction is long gone. Murakami embodies this new style of travel writing in his: “concern for memory, a nostalgic sense of loss, as well as a foregrounding of the limits of knowledge and representation”.

In Sputnik Sweetheart, “K”, narrates the entire book from a place of nostalgia and wistfulness. He introduces the readers to Sumire, a character who, from an early age, experienced loss at an early age. She dedicates her life to being a writer, a profession that reduced to its most simple level, is a recording of memory and imagination. All these themes are part of what Gabriel deems to be the new foci of travel writing. He also claims “Murakami’s writing follows a repeated pattern, a path outwards that in the final analysis spirals inwards…attempt to confront the exotic and unfamiliar that ends up obsessed with the familiar.” This perfectly describes the journey that Sumire undergoes throughout Sputnik Sweetheart.

Sumire is searching for something beyond what she already knows. She is of Korean descent growing up in Japan. She seems to be searching for something larger than what she has, and then she finds Miu. Miu is new and completely unfamiliar territory. Not only has Sumier never been in love before, but also initially she is just shocked that she is in love with a woman, as that was not the direction she was expecting. Sumire begins to truly embrace the unfamiliar as she lets herself be dressed, groomed, and influenced by Miu, until Sumire is something completely unfamiliar to the reader. Sumire is continually assessing herself and the relationship she establishes with Miu, and once she and Miu journey to Greece, she “attempt[s] to confront the exotic and unfamiliar”, and finally admits her feelings to Miu. There, in a completely foreign and unwelcoming place, Samire ends up “obsessed with the familiar” once again. Not only does it seems she is back in Japan for good, but on a deeper level, once again Sumire has become obsessed with a woman who cannot be anything more than a memory to her. Sumire put her mother’s memory on a pedestal, and by the end of the novel, Miu is alongside Sumire’s mother on the pedestal. Both memories to be worshipped and obsessed over, and it seems that Sumire’s venture into the unknown turned out to be a bit more familiar than she may have realized.