She’s messy and in the throes of an existentialist crisis. When we first meet him he is a college student who has fallen in love with Sumire, who is very much the classic Murakami female character, in that she’s Not Like Other Girls.
Anyway, we are stuck with K and his creepy male gaze. I mean, I honestly think this could have been a much stronger novel if the narrative had alternated between Sumire and Miu. While K acknowledges that it may be unusual for him to tell Sumire’s love story, he doesn’t provide a particularly satisfying answer. That he chooses to tell their story through ‘K’, our male straight narrator, is also somewhat iffy. It often went from being slightly ridiculous to straight-up ludicrous. I cringed many times while reading Sputnik Sweetheart: his portrayal of the romantic/sexual relationship between Sumire and Miu, the two women at the centre of the narrative, was yikes.
The main reason why I do not get on with his work is that, well, his women are on a league of their own when it comes to female characters written by male authors. Over the last couple of months, I have picked up several of his short story collections but never felt compelled to finish them. It would be safe to say that I do have a bit of an uneasy relationship with Murakami’s work.
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