Looking for Laika...in all the wrong places

Several days and at least 3 or 4 drafts later, I'm still struggling to communicate my ideas.

I was quite interested in the "inexpressibility topos". Hence the struggle. I actually picked up a book about Montale by Clodagh Brook that specifically tackles the inexpressibility topos in Montale's work. While much of it was irrelevant, it developed a useful history of the idea (Dante through the Modernists), which I found quite illuminating.

There is certainly more than one connection to be made with Sputnik Sweetheart, but a few stood out:

(1) Brook highlights the significance of WWI for the Modernists - “One of the primary theories to emerge is that a world which had undergone such radical transformations in those years needed a concomitant upheaval in its means of expression” (Brook 6). I wonder if the same might be said of the impact of the Tokyo gas attacks on Murakami. On reading Underground, I found a number of places in which he questions his own capacity to represent the realities of the individuals he interviewed. He was especially struck by an interview with Ms. "Shizuko Akashi", who, as a result of the sarin attack, lost both her memory and ability to speak. When faced with the necessity to speak for her, he questioned "just how vividly could [his] choice of words convey to the reader the various emotions (fear, despair, loneliness, anger, numbness, alienation, confusion, hope…) these people had experienced” (236). This problem takes on even greater meaning in the second section of his book when Murakami suggests that terrorism and perhaps violence in general is the manifestation of a need for self-expression that exceeds the capacity of words and language.

Given the timing of Sputnik Sweetheart's publication, it seems likely that many of the themes and issues that the Tokyo gas attack provoked for Murakami were still reverberating as he penned his novel.

(2) Having already strayed off the path of a formalist reading of the novel, it doesn't seem like much of a stretch to imagine Sumire as a kindred spirit to Murakami. She seems to share his uncertainty about the capacity of her prose. By her own account, her writing is lacking something essential. “Problem is, once I sit at my desk and put all these down on paper, I realize something vital is missing. It doesn’t crystallize – no crystals, just pebbles.” In response, K recounts the story of the Chinese gates built with the bones of soldiers who had died in war. “When the gate was finished they’d bring several dogs over to it, slit their throats, and sprinkle their blood on the gate.” The ritual was thought to revive the soldiers’ souls and complete the gate. Although Murakami returns several more times to the baptismal blood bath, its meaning is never revealed. Through his use of metaphor, Murakami extends the practice of elevating the ineffable. The very thing that would make Sumire's writing complete and perhaps, because of her sense of the inextricable link between her idea of self and her capacity to express, would Sumire herself whole is "some form of truth harboured beyond the word" (Brook 1).

(3) All of these themes come to a head with Sumire’s last words, so to speak. Sumire’s epiphany at the end of the document that K reads on her computer is simultaneously revelatory and dissatisfying for the reader. It on the one hand offers an acknowledgment of the coexistence of two worlds and hints at an explanation for Sumire’s disappearance (which would be an epiphany for the reader) and on the other hand denies the reader closure by ending with an unanswered and perhaps unanswerable question.

“I’m in love with Miu. With the Miu on this side, needless to say. But I also love the Miu on the other side just as much. The moment this thought struck me it was like I could hear – with an audible creak – myself splitting in two. As if Miu’s own split became a rupture that had taken hold of me.

One question remains, however. If this side, where Miu is, is not the real world – if this side is actually the other side – what about me, the person who shares the same temporal and spatial plane with her?

Who in the world am I?”

There is an incapacity of language to answer the question of her own reality. The novel is ultimately just an ellipsis, a sort of meta-aposiopesis, “pointing towards it without voicing it” (Brook 11).

In Underground, Murakami writes, “Reality is created out of confusion and contradiction, and if you exclude those elements, you’re no longer talking about reality” (363). This is undoubtedly what we encounter in the novel. Each effort to pin down some truth about the characters (K’s evasion of self-description, Miu’s trauma, and indeed Sumire’s disappearance), leads further away from reality. Words become increasingly inadequate to express the multiplicity of selves each character ostensibly represents. As Murakami concludes in Underground, “The mountains are not mountains anymore; the sun is not the sun.”