Rating: 
Summary: Poetic and surprising story - presence of absence
Review: I am still uncertain I grasped all the underlying meanings and intentions of Haruki Murakami in this poetic story but know that this was a unique read; one which requires time and thought in order to really "get into" and enjoy. The story takes several turns and its focus shifts between its three characters.
The story starts with the description of Sumire, a bit of a lost soul who wants to become a writer. Sumire writes all the time, but something is lacking. Her male friend, the narrator of the story whose name is never revealed, encourages her that "a story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side..."
what he really means is that Sumire needs more time, more life experience, maybe more pain in order to breath life into the story; Sumire however, seems to remain on the search for the "other side". When Sumire falls in love with Miu, a much older business woman, her life undergoes a tremendous change and suddenly she is no longer able to write. As if somehow the focus of her life has shifted... The voice of the narrator who has been telling us about Sumire changes its tone and we now understand that he is an active participant in the story - he is in love with Sumire but understands that his love for this meaningful and special soul companion will not be returned. This is the pain he has to suffer.
The story reaches its climax in the Greek island where Sumire and Miu have gone for vacation. One night the narrator receives a telephone call from Miu who begs him to come to the Island at once.
It is never clear who is the real hero of the story as the tale shifts from one character to another and all characters are endearing in the same tender vulnerable way. Maybe the male narrator, speaking in its own voice is the one who touches your heart the most but you can feel the pain and lonliness of all characters and their endless search for something which is impossible to get.. at least not on this side.
The story is definitely surprising - starting from its special name and characters and follow its intriguing tale, touching the real and the supernatural in a way that is in total harmony and agreement with all the book.
Sputnik Sweetheart deals with the presence and absence of people and how absence can be present in every nuance of ones life. I think this is also intended in the name of the story and the explanation given in the preface to the term "Sputnik" ending in the words: "but the satellite was never recovered"...which should have given me the first clue to what is about to happen, one of the many clues and signs that Murakami will give along the book. The book by the way is not depressing as it may sound. Sad and poetic yet you can feel a life force running underneath.
Rating: 
Summary: Cheated out of an ending
Review: This is the story of a strange love triangle, wherein the main character disappears. There are some nice moments in the book, but it seems as if the writer was short on plot lines and never really finished it, and didn't bother to connect a lot of the narrative to the plot.He seemed to set up a lot of metaphor and other nice images but never used them to their fullest. It was meant to be a melancholy love story + a mystery, but it ended up being a complete waste of time and ink.
Rating:
Summary: Life is just a dream, sweetheart
Review: "Sputnik Sweetheart" was my first Murakami book, and I am fascinated. There will be more Murakami in my future. The book reads like the few moments of unreality before settling into sleep. Like something from the comic book "The Sandman," this is a story of dreams, moons, love and cats. With the title "Sputnik Sweetheart," I was expecting some sort of hard-metal story, where love shatters on technology or maybe something about the fast pace of modern life in Japan. I certainly wasn't expecting this gentle, silent love short story, told to the sound of Brahms and with the flavor of French wines. Of course, the style of writing and the ideas are the forefront of the novel, with the actual plot taking a supporting role. The characters are wholly unrealized, mere glimpses of caricatures. They love, they live and they do so poetically. They have ideas, and those ideas are worked out in the medium of the written word. Minimalist seems to be thrown around, and maybe that is so, but I don't see it. The words flow, and hold together well. The plot is fleeting, an altogether unresolved, the the half-memory of a dream that made sense at the time, but seems strange in the re-telling. An excellent book, one best read right before bedtime.
Rating:
Summary: mysteriously engaging, peculiar character
Review: a love story? well kind of. to me, a book about romance makes me say yuck, for lack of better terminology. this book did have romance, but the genius of Murakami made it anything bu t. Mystery, philosophical, riveting, sombre, page-turning. This story is of Sumire, a college drop out whom lives to write. she is misplaced in the world, a beatnik of sorts who dances to her own rhythm. the main character, a teacher, loves her and they are best friends. Sumire meets an enigmatic elderly woman whom she falls in love with. i dont think Sumire is homosexual, it just happened that she fell in love....witn a woman. they escape together to a secluded greek island. Sumire discovers secrets behind the enigmatic woman. murakami spins a supernatural element into the tale, reminiscient of his book dance,dance,dance. Sumire acts weird one night and dissapears. the teacher is summoned to trace what steps she didnt leave trace of.
Rating: 
Summary: Elegant writing doesn't salvage incredible shrinking plot
Review: The first-person narrator, a young primary school teacher, is enamored of a brash young woman named Sumire, who is completely devoted to the idea of becoming a novelist. Although she is pleased to have him as a friend, she is not attracted to him romantically, and instead falls head over heels for Miu, a sophisticated older woman with a mysterious secret in her past that prevents her from consummating this, or any relationship. That doesn't stop Sumire from going to work for Miu as a personal secretary, or from embarking with her on an extended business trip through Europe, but it does keep Sumire too busy to keep up with her old friend, or continue the writing that once meant so much to her. Our hero listlessly tries to get on with his life, until he receives word that Sumire is missing - vanished without a trace from a small island in Greece. Unfortunately, about halfway through the novel, we become aware that the rules of reality have shifted on us, and we're suddenly in a world where anything's possible - a change that sadly undercuts the fairly prosaic, modern-day love story that we thought we were reading. After reading about frigidity, platonic love, and lesbianism, we're suddenly dealing with doppelgangers and alternate universes. Perhaps Murakami is trying to study the nature of life-changing experiences, but by making his examples so other-worldly, this reviewer finds it difficult to empathize with characters whose problems are so plainly impossible. To put it another way, if a good friend of yours had a near-death experience in a car crash, or on the operating table, you would likely be far more sympathetic than if he told you he'd been abducted by aliens from another planet. Instead, you'd be sorely tempted to assume he was off his nut, and if he didn't get over it, you'd probably find yourself distancing yourself from him, and that's basically what happened to this reviewer and this book. The temptation is very strong to say, "Come off it. Nobody's going to believe that, so either tell us what really happened or else forget the whole thing". Murakami is clearly a talented writer, but this book doesn't know what it's doing and never goes anywhere. Surely no one will buy this book as science fiction or horror - 95% of the story is as everyday as Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. But the outlandish scenes totally upstage the rest of the story, effectively rendering the rest of the book irrelevant. Perhaps Murakami had a short novel about a lesbian romance and didn't know how to end it, so he took a story fragment about an out-of-body experience and used that for his Second Act, after which the story stumbles aimlessly along for another 50 tedious pages before fizzling out altogether. In any case, the resultant hybrid simply isn't fair to the reader, who enters the novel in good faith expecting a real world resolution, and instead finds no resolution at all.
Rating:
Summary: Murakami hits new depths
Review: I know many-a Murakami fan will disagree with me here, but I find this to be the most complex of all his works. Maybe complex isn't the right word. Enigmatic is better. I can talk for hours on all the other novels, but with this one...frankly I'm stumped. It deals with love and loss, that's clear, but I'm just entirely sure what he's trying to say about it in the end. It seems as if he's almost contradicting him self in a few places. Like the Sumire, Miu, "K" triangle. For a long time I thought that "K" and Miu were supposed to represent the two aspects of Sumire's personality that she was trying to reconcile...but the ending by no means supports it. And I'm still trying to figure out what exactly Carrot's place is in the whole scheme of things. A child version of "K"? Or of Sumire? Or a combination of both? Or something completely different, the result of misplaced love, maybe? This isn't all to say that I didn't like this novel. Quite the contrary in fact. It's great. There are moments of sheer brillance, and the writing, which is (like South of the Border, West of the Sun) completely minced to heck by the HORRENDOUS tranlsation job by Philip Gabriel, has moments that transcend the cliches and colloquilism that Gabriel unskillfully inserts in to the prose, moments that well have you stop dead in your reading, and just gaze at that one sentance over and over again. I really can't stress it enough, READ MURAKAMI! He is, in my opinion, the most important living novelist in the world. It's a shame that the international community doesn't recogize this. Murakami is more then a simple Japanese novelist, or post-modern experimenter. He's creating a whole new ficiton that every literate person can relate too.
Rating:
Summary: A Less Intense, More Mellow Murakami's Look at Loneliness
Review: Admittedly "Sputnik Sweetheart" is a far cry from the densely written, crime detective fiction of Murakami's earlier works, most notably "A Wild Sheep Chase" and "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle". Yet surprisingly, it too resonates with themes of loss and loneliness prevalent in those earlier works, in a more upbeat literary style which easily brings to mind some recent works by the likes of Rick Moody and Jonathan Lethem, among others. Here, Murakami's protagonist, a school teacher, embarks on a strange odyssey to Greece's islands in search of his missing friend Sumire, an unpublished writer. He is summoned to Greece by Sumire's traveling companion, Miu, a businesswoman, who, like Sumire, has some interesting secrets of her own. A terse book, but still among Murakami's best works of fiction.
Rating:
Summary: another in a strand of gems
Review: No need to extoll this masterpiece, just some hints
on how a lowbrow sci-fi-trophic type like me became a
Murakami addict and loved it. Basically, start with
Hard Boiled Wonderland and work backwards, then forwards.
By the time you get to this gem, you'll appreciate
the rock-garden clarity of a single supernatural
moment embedded in the best of assimilible
Americanisms - the hardboiled detective-by-default
(The Long Goodbye) who has almost succeeded in expunging
his own self, as he investigates the mysterious
unreachable waif-woman (Raise High the Roof Beam
Carpenters), and the more mysterious, more unreachable
wonder-woman who is her unintentional yet supremely
sophisticated lover (The Lyre of Orpheus).
Rating:
Summary: another one of murakami's genius works
Review: nearly all of murakami's work is brilliant, and this falls into that category. when his themes work, they really work. if you've ever enjoyed anything else by murakami, it is worth your time to read this. if you've never read murakami this is one of the less thrilling novels, but nonetheless excellent.
Rating: 
Summary: Loneliness and the Broken Heart
Review: Murakami doesn't break any new ground here ... for me, the overall tone of the book was similar to South of the Border, West of the Sun ... the book starts off with a straight-forward, yet complicated desire (think Norwegian Wood), moves into mysterious disappearances and dual-selfs (think Wind-Up Bird), and ends with a more edgy stretch involving a security cop and a kid in a scene that reminded me a lot of Dance, Dance, Dance. The story itself is interesting but I didn't find it particularly compelling, certainly not like some of his earlier, longer works. For me at least, the most notable part of this book was the skill with which Murakami dipped into his bucket of Loneliness and painted the tales of several unique individuals who could not be satisfied. K, a loner who is distant from his family, loses the one person he truly loves (who cannot love him back the same way he loves her anyway). Sumire, whose tornado-like love cannot be returned by Miu because of Miu's strange experience in Switzerland. Miu, who suffered a truly bizarre experience on a Ferris Wheel and is only a shell of her previous self (Murakami's one of the few writers who can make a ferris wheel, of all things, terrifying). K's married "girlfriend" and her son are also lonely. Murakami somehow manages to keep this tale sad without being depressing. A good work, it'll be appreciated by fans of Murakami. However, if you haven't read anything by him and are looking for someplace to start, I'd recommend one of his earlier works first. Murakami seems to have turned a little more mellow with his last few books. Nevertheless, a good read.
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