The Other World

The Escalator - Scott Mutter

“I am a pilgrim on the edge, on the edge of my own perception. We are all travelers at the edge, at the edge of our own perception.”

-Scott Mutter

Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart may include a story about the physical act of travelling; however, it is obvious that the travelling he’s really concerned with is that of a different quality. In this story, Murakami explores travelling to the unknown, to the “other side.” One of the most intriguing and mysterious parts of the book is Sumire’s telling of Miu’s experience of seeing herself making love to the Spaniard from the Ferris wheel. Miu explains that after the incident she felt that “I was still on this side, here. But another me, maybe half of me, had gone over to the other side… I was split in two forever… It’s not like something was stolen away from me, because it all still exists, but on the other side. Just a single mirror separates us from the other side. But I can never cross the boundary of that pane of glass. Never,” (Murakami 157).

This idea of travelling to the other side brings to mind a kind of trip to a mysterious, ghostly otherworld, but it could also be a psychological or spiritual journey that Murakami’s getting at. Miu’s story of splitting in two after the incident in the Ferris wheel mirrors Sumire’s transformation after meeting Miu - she trades in her thrift store clothes for more fashionable clothes and gives up writing to become Miu’s assistant. After writing Miu’s story, Sumire asks, “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?” (Murakami 161). Sumire’s psychological search for identity and Miu’s mystical experience seem to be similar.

Sumire’s disappearance is also very mysterious and K seems to believe that she has travelled to somewhere intangible. His hypothesis is that she “happened to find this door, turned the knob, and slipped outside – from this side to the other...What lay beyond that door was beyond my powers of imagination. The door closed, and Sumire wouldn’t be coming back,” (Murakami 167).

The line between what is real and what is not becomes further blurred as the book nears its end. K hears music when he’s staying alone in the cabin on the Greek island. After he follows the music up the slope it’s hard to tell whether K is dreaming or awake. He feels unreal, saying “I knew this wasn’t my hand anymore. I can’t explain it. But at a glance I knew. My hand was no longer my hand, my legs no longer my legs… As if a voodoo magician had put a spell on me, blowing my transient life into this lump of clay… my real life had fallen asleep somewhere, and a faceless someone was stuffing it in a suitcase, about to leave,” (Murakami 170).

In travelling, these themes of unstableness in identity and reality are especially prevalent. When K is in the airport waiting for his plane he observes, “The world had lost all sense of reality. Colors were unnatural, details crude. The background was papier-mâché, the stars made out of aluminum foil. You could see the glue and the heads of the nails holding it all together…In the bustle of the airport, passengers dashing here and there, the world I shared with Sumire seemed shabby, helpless, uncertain. Neither of us knew anything that really mattered, nor did we have the ability to rectify that. There was nothing solid we could depend on. We were nearly boundless zeros, just pitiful little beings swept form one kind of oblivion to another,” (Murakami 84). This sense that reality is nothing more than a set made of papier-mâché and aluminum foil can be accentuated by travel. Everything is a little more uncertain as you’re being “swept from one oblivion to another.” This feeling of being “up in the air” when travelling, the feeling of no longer knowing who you are and what is real, is what Murakami is describing in Sputnik Sweetheart: “It made Miu see a second self. It took Sumire’s cat away somewhere. It made Sumire disappear. And it brought me here, in the midst of music – that most likely – never existed. Before me lay a bottomless darkness; behind me, a world of pale light. I stood there on the top of a mountain in a foreign land, bathed in moonlight. Maybe this had all been meticulously planned, from the very beginning,” (Murakami 172).