Sputnik Sweetheart полностью

I might as well just come right out and say it. I was in love with Sumire. I was attracted to her from the first time we talked, and soon there was no turning back. For a long time she was the only thing I could think about. I tried to tell her how I felt, but somehow the feelings and the right words couldn’t connect. Maybe it was for the best. If I had been able to tell her my feelings, she would have just laughed at me.

While Sumire and I were friends, I went out with two or three other girls. It’s not that I don’t remember the exact number. Two, three—it depends on how you count. Add to this girls I slept with once or twice, and the list would be a little longer. Anyhow, while I made love to these other girls, I thought about Sumire. Or at least thoughts of her grazed a corner of my mind. I imagined I was holding her. Kind of a caddish thing to do, but I couldn’t help myself.

*

Let me get back to how Sumire and Miu met.

Miu had heard of Jack Kerouac and had a vague sense that he was a novelist of some kind. What kind of novelist, though, she couldn’t recall. “Kerouac … hmm… Wasn’t he a Sputnik?”

Sumire couldn’t work out what she meant. Knife and fork poised in mid-air, she gave it some thought. “Sputnik? You mean the first satellite the Soviets sent up, in the fifties? Jack Kerouac was an American novelist. I guess they do overlap in terms of generation…”

“Isn’t that what they called the writers back then?” Miu asked. She traced a circle on the table with her fingertip, as if rummaging through some special jar full of memories.

“Sputnik … ?”

“The name of a literary movement. You know—how they classify writers in various schools of writing. Like Shiga Naoya

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was in the White Birch School.”

Finally it dawned on Sumire. “Beatnik!”

Miu lightly dabbed at the corner of her mouth with a napkin.

“Beatnik—Sputnik. I never can remember those kinds of terms. It’s like the Kenmun Restoration or the Treaty of Rapallo. Ancient history.”

A gentle silence descended on them, suggestive of the flow of time.

“The Treaty of Rapallo?” Sumire asked.

Miu smiled. A nostalgic, intimate smile, like a treasured old possession pulled out of the back of a drawer. Her eyes narrowed in an utterly charming way. She reached out and, with her long, slim fingers, gently ruffled Sumire’s already tousled hair. It was such a sudden yet natural gesture that Sumire could only return the smile.

*

Ever since that day, Sumire’s private name for Miu was Sputnik Sweetheart. She loved the sound of it. It made her think of Laika, the dog. The man-made satellite streaking soundlessly across the blackness of outer space. The dark, lustrous eyes of the dog gazing out of the tiny window. In the infinite loneliness of space, what could Laika possibly be looking at?

*

This Sputnik conversation took place at a wedding reception for Sumire’s cousin at a posh hotel in Akasaka. Sumire wasn’t particularly close to her cousin; in fact they didn’t get along at all. She’d just as soon be tortured as attend one of these receptions, but she couldn’t back out of this one. She and Miu were seated next to each other at one of the tables. Miu didn’t go into all the details, but it seemed she’d taught Sumire’s cousin the piano—or something along those lines—when she

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was taking the entrance exams for the university music department. It wasn’t a long or very close relationship, clearly, but Miu felt obliged to attend.

In the instant Miu touched her hair, Sumire fell in love, as if she were crossing a field when bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head. Something like an artistic revelation. Which is why, at that point, it didn’t matter to Sumire that the person she fell in love with happened to be a woman. I don’t think Sumire ever had what you’d call a lover. In high school she had a few boyfriends, guys she’d go to the cinema with, go swimming with. I couldn’t picture any of those relations ever getting very deep. Sumire was too focused on becoming a novelist to really fall for anybody. If she did experience sex—or something close to it—in high school, I’m sure it would have been less out of sexual desire or love than literary curiosity.

“To be perfectly frank, sexual desire has me baffled,” she once told me, making a sober face. This was just before she left college, I believe; she’d downed five banana daiquiris and was pretty drunk. “You know—how it all comes about. What’s your take on it?”

“Sexual desire’s not something you understand,” I said, giving my usual middle-of-the-road opinion. “It’s just there.”