Sputnik Sweetheart

Stayed up late last night to finish this, no regrets.

I do enjoy Murakami's novels more so than his short stories. Though the sample size of short story collection is two, so not very statistically significant. But this also applies to Vonnegut.

Anyways, this counts one of my favourite Murakami's. Because the ending was very...unexpected, and also because each of the three characters all say some heart wrenching things.

Let's start with Miu:

It didn't look like she was trying to find the right words, rather that she was immersed in some personal memory, one without beginning and without end.

and no matter how close you are to someone it's not that easy to be with someone else day after day

^thank you for speaking my mind.

And it came to me then. That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal in their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.

and then the narrator K:

And I couldn't just shelve those feelings, for there was nothing to take their place.

So that's how we live our lives. No matter how deep and fatal the loss, no matter how important the things that's stolen from us - that's snatched right out of our hands - even if we are left completely changed, with only the outer layer of skin from before, we continue to play out our lives this way, in silence. We draw ever nearer to the end of our allotted span of time, bidding it farewell as it trails off behind. Repeating, often adroitly, the endless deeds of the everyday. Leaving behind a feeling of immeasurable emptiness.

Maybe, in some distant place, everything is already, quietly, lost. Or at least there exists a silent place where everything can disappear, melting together in a single overlapping figure. And as we live out loves we discover - drawing towards us the thin threads attached to each - what had been lost. I closed my eyes and tried to bring to mind as many beautiful lost things as I could. Drawing them closer, holding onto them. Knowing all the while that their lives are fleeting.

^reminds me of Evangelion and the these two lines "我只要沿着记忆的路线 / 到最深处纵然那只是瞬间" from the ED of 仙剑三.

I dream. Sometimes I think that's the only only right thing to do. To dream, to live in the world of dreams - just as Sumire said. But it doesn't last forever. Wakefulness always comes to take me back.

Finally, Sumire:

The me sitting here and the image of me I have are out of sync  

^this sounded so familiar to me when I first came across it. I thought it was because I read a prototype short story. But I was wrong, it is because I had a One Piece wallpaper featuring Sanji with that quotation. Correction, I have another Sanji wallpaper, by the same artist, with another Murakami quotation "only the dead stay seventeen forever" (Norwegian Wood).

Understanding is but the sum of our misunderstandings.
[...]
In the world we live, what we know and what we don't know are like Siamese twins, inseparable, existing in a state of confusion.
Confusion, confusion.
Who can really distinguish between the sea and what's reflected in it? Or tell the difference between the falling rain and loneliness?

^my first impression of this is Bebop's theme of "life is a dream", and damn was I spot on:

So what are people suppose to do if they want to avoid a collision [what happens when what we know and what we don't know are not separated. Thinking is a strategy to make the two live together in peace] but still [not think]? Sound hard? Not at all. Logically, it's easy. C'est simple. The answer is dreams. Dreaming on and on. Entering the world of dreams, and never coming out. Living in dreams for the rest of time.

and finally:

That's gotta be one of the principles behind reality. Accepting things that are hard to comprehend, and leaving them that way.