Soft, small carnivores

a vicious animal, ready to strikeEpiphany seems to be an important aspect of travel for many people, even if not in the context of a novel. Epiphany is generally a word used with a positive connotation. By traveling, many of us try to learn new things and reach new levels of existence, whether through an epiphany or simply by relaxing. Sometimes, though, epiphany can sneak up on us when we least expect it, as it does for K in Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami. After hearing from Miu that Sumire, his object of desire, went missing in Greece K heads to Greece to help search for her. The news and the trip caught him off guard having come up all of a sudden. This trip leads to him meeting Miu, learning all about their relationship and about them as people.

In the process, K even has an epiphany of his own which he may or may not have expected or been looking for. After reading documents one and two, he comes to the conclusion that Sumire must have gone to the “other side” (165). He then narrates his thoughts about a memory that Sumire had written: “So what should we do to avoid a collision? Logically, it’s easy. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living there for the rest of time” (166). The narrator writes about the night after he read these documents that Sumire had left as he begins to ponder these ideas of “dreams.” He wonders about how to get to this “world of dreams” and he writes about the difficulty of putting it into words. After making dinner for himself, K listens to a couple of Mozart cassettes from Sumire’s room before, at some point, drifing off to sleep only to be woken up again (possibly within the dream world) by music being sung in Greek. K makes his way out into the summer night in search of the source of the music when he began to feel a sense to being swept into a different world. He tells us:

I stopped and turned to look behind me. The slope twisted palely down toward the town like the tracks of some gigantic insect. I looked up at the sky then, under the moonlight and glanced at my palm. With a rush of understanding 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 (170).

It is at this point that K begins to his epiphany. He seems to leave his physical body behind, entering a separate world. The setting is perfect for him to experience an epiphany. By going into nature, he is setting forth on the biggest journey of the trip. In addition, the words “rush or understanding” have a very epiphany-related meaning. Something about his experience in Greece leads him to the end of a road, some sort of completion that allowed him to enter this world. Be it the reading of the documents of the walk outside in search of music, he has channeled into the spirit of Sumire. What he describes appears to be a kind of religious experience. He continues to say:

Time reversed itself, looped back, collapsed, reordered itself. The world stretched out endlessly—and yet was defined and limited. Sharp images—just the images alone—passed down dark corridors, like jellyfish, like souls adrift. But I steeled myself not to look at them (170).

Time goes by as K continues to search for the source of the music he has been hearing to no avail. Sumire is not to be found. The more time passes the more he tries to convince himself it was a dream or “illusion”. He tries to convince himself that it never happened or that maybe it had been “meticulously planned”. After making it back to the cottage, K has a lot of trouble trying to fall asleep (probably because of something that resonated inside him from his epiphany). His experience ends with a vision he has of cats slowly devouring him. “If I listened carefully, somewhere far far away I could hear the cats lapping up my brain” (172). The cat symbolism really brings together this Murakami landscape. It really shows us K’s despair over having lost Sumire. And, ultimately, it is this knowledge that he takes from the epiphany. The next chapter begins: “In the end, we never found out what happened to Sumire” (173).