Sputnik Sweetheart

Combining the early, straightforward seductions ofNorwegian Wood and the complex mysteries ofThe Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, this new novelhis seventh translated into Englishis Haruki Murakami at his most satisfying and representative best. The scenario is as simple as it is uncomfortable: a college student falls in love (once and for all, despite everything that transpires afterward) with a classmate whose devotion to Kerouac and an untidy writerly life precludes any personal commitmentsuntil she meets a considerably older and far more sophisticated businesswoman. It is through this wormhole that she enters Murakami's surreal yet humane universe, to which she serves as guide both for us and for her frustrated suitor, now a teacher. In the course of her travels from parochial Japan through Europe and ultimately to an island off the coast of Greece, she disappears without a trace, leaving only lineaments of her fate: computer accounts of bizarre events and stories within stories. The teacher, summoned to assist in the search for her, experiences his own ominous, haunting visions, which lead him nowhere but home to Japanand there, under the expanse of deep space and the still-orbiting Sputnik, he finally achieves a true understanding of his beloved. A love story, a missing-person story, a detective storyall enveloped in a philosophical mysteryand, finally, a profound meditation on human longing.

Haruki Murakami was born in Kyoto in 1949 and now lives in Tokyo. He is the author of several novels, including <b>Norwegian Wood</b>, <b>Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World</b>, and <b>A Wild Sheep Chase</b>, and of <b>Underground</b>, a new work of nonfiction. Murakami's work has been translated into sixteen languages.<br><br>