Sputnik Sweetheart

After reading two Murakami novels a couple years ago (The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and Norweigian Wood), I admitted that the guy was very quickly climbing the list of my favorite authors, but I didn't get around to reading a third book until just recently. My choice was one of Dee's favorites: Sputnik Sweetheart, and it certainly lived up to the lofty expectations set by the first two. Combining the strange dream-like reality of Wind-up Bird with the brutal heartbreak of Norweigian Wood, Murakami delivers another downer of a book that had me enthralled anyway. Yet again the story here is character, character, character, as the first half of the book is spent developing the unrequited love between a young straight-laced teacher and his best friend, an aspiring writer living off of her parents. She doesn't love him back, but also doesn't feel an attraction to anyone until meeting an older woman who offers her a job as an assistant. The two leave on a cross-country business trip, leaving the protagonist on his own, until a bizarre series of events lead the man to seek out the two women, at which point the plot really starts to kick into high gear. I don't think I enjoyed this quite as much as Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is still probably the book I've liked the most since I started logging, but there are a lot of similarities between the two. This does leave me a little concerned for the rest of his books- he's covering the same theme in different ways, and I'd be interested in seeing him tackle something else besides loneliness and the end of relationships- he did this with student protests in Norweigian Wood and Japanese war crimes in Wind-Up Bird Chronicle but both of those took a backseat to the love story that drove each book. Still though, that's a concern for later- I've loved the first three books of Murakami's that I've read, so I guess I'll keep on chugging.