“In the spring of her twenty-second year, Sumire fell in love for the first time in her life.” The title of this book is from a malaprop from one of the characters. In discussing books by Jack Kerouac and writers like him, the character calls them “Sputnik writers” meaning Beatnik, and this becomes an inside joke between the two. But of course the misunderstanding also becomes a symbol, and is appropriate to Kerouac as a wanderer. The novel goes on to remind us that Sputnik […]

Most of all in his short fiction, I can never quite tell how seriously to take Haruki Murakami’s writing, but at the same time I am compelled by it. The lack of seriousness I feel (and I don’t mean in the writing itself, because I do think he takes himself seriously, and in an appropriate way) is that so many of the stories are almost exactly alike the other stories. If you took the names off and took the plots away a little, would you […]