Split

I have just finished Haruki Murakami's Sputnik Sweetheart. It is a delineation of 3 characters - K, the logically disaffected narrator, loves Sumire, a mutable creature of passion, who loves Miu, an elegant and enigmatic older woman.

We follow K's helpless observation of Sumire's uncontrollable spiral into Miu's life, up to the point of Sumire's abruptly mysterious disappearance from the face of the Earth.

Murakami indulgently fleshes out the characters of K and Sumire as he charts K's obsessive search for the missing girl in an increasingly surreal world of random clues and lost connections.

But you realise that the key to the entire plot is Miu, whom he describes most sparingly and precisely only halfway through the novel. Her simple yet terrible secret represents the focal counter-point between reality and dreams, as represented by K and Sumire respectively.

I hear Murakami has hits and misses, but this story is pure genius, unfolding in a symmetrical metaphor of duality that becomes hauntingly apparent only towards the end.

For the past 6 months of my life I lost myself utterly. Now I think I have found that invisible yet necessary balance. Once in awhile we are all torn between 2 selves, but whatever the outcome, I believe that we deserve only the best. I truly do.