Sputnik Sweetheart

K. is in love with Sumire. Sumire is in love with Miu. And Miu, it seems, is beyond the reach of ordinary love entirely. When Sumire vanishes without explanation from a small Greek island, K. flies across the world to find her — and finds himself instead at the threshold of something he cannot name or explain.

Sputnik Sweetheart is one of Murakami’s most intimate and haunting novels: a meditation on the distances that exist between people who love each other, on the private worlds we inhabit that no one else can enter, and on the particular loneliness of unrequited desire. It takes its title from a Sputnik-era satellite — another object sending signals no one can quite decode — and the metaphor runs through every page.

Murakami’s prose, in Philip Gabriel’s acclaimed translation, has the quality that makes his work so uniquely compelling: a surface of perfect, ordinary clarity that opens, without warning, onto depths of strangeness and melancholy. Brief, luminous, and impossible to forget. If you haven’t read Murakami, start here. If you have, this one will stay with you longest. Published by Vintage.