Love and Loneliness using Sputnik Sweetheart by Haruki Murakami
“LOVE AND LONELINESS”
Ashima Rangi
AP English Literature and Composition
Mr Powles
14-05-13
Humans are probably the greediest animals that have walked on the face of earth. There is always a want to achieve something greater than what one has. This might be a positive force on one hand, but on the other it can leave someone completely unsatisfied and unhappy with their life. One of the things out of the many which humans strive to look for in their life is love. Love, a recurring theme in novels, movies, music, poetry, drama and what not, is hard to escape from. Whether it is motherly, friendly or romantic love, we all have experienced it at some point in our lives. But does love actually exist? If we look at this question from Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart’s point of view, the answer would be no. Even though love is a major part of the book, there is not a single moment where two people are in love with each other. All the characters of the book have had some experience with love, but in the end all of them are managing their own lives all by themselves. The book strongly hints the nonexistence of love and the loneliness caused by it.
The best way to know as to what exactly love is, is to look inside our own self. If we claim to “feel” it, something must be going on inside our bodies to give us that sense of falling or being in love. Firstly, “it’s your brain, not your heart, that falls in love” (Myers’, 51). It is evident from many scientific and psychological experiments that “human romantic love is associated with dopaminergic pathways in the brain” (Fisher, Aron, Brown, 2175). So when Sumire, a lesbian in the book Sputnik Sweetheart, “fell in love, as if she was crossing a field when bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head,” the real culprits were something known as neurotransmitters and hormones which are, in simple words, chemicals in our body that control us (Murakami, 9). Sumire was in the “lust
Ashima Rangi
AP English Literature and Composition
Mr Powles
14-05-13
Humans are probably the greediest animals that have walked on the face of earth. There is always a want to achieve something greater than what one has. This might be a positive force on one hand, but on the other it can leave someone completely unsatisfied and unhappy with their life. One of the things out of the many which humans strive to look for in their life is love. Love, a recurring theme in novels, movies, music, poetry, drama and what not, is hard to escape from. Whether it is motherly, friendly or romantic love, we all have experienced it at some point in our lives. But does love actually exist? If we look at this question from Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart’s point of view, the answer would be no. Even though love is a major part of the book, there is not a single moment where two people are in love with each other. All the characters of the book have had some experience with love, but in the end all of them are managing their own lives all by themselves. The book strongly hints the nonexistence of love and the loneliness caused by it.
The best way to know as to what exactly love is, is to look inside our own self. If we claim to “feel” it, something must be going on inside our bodies to give us that sense of falling or being in love. Firstly, “it’s your brain, not your heart, that falls in love” (Myers’, 51). It is evident from many scientific and psychological experiments that “human romantic love is associated with dopaminergic pathways in the brain” (Fisher, Aron, Brown, 2175). So when Sumire, a lesbian in the book Sputnik Sweetheart, “fell in love, as if she was crossing a field when bang! a bolt of lightning zapped her right in the head,” the real culprits were something known as neurotransmitters and hormones which are, in simple words, chemicals in our body that control us (Murakami, 9). Sumire was in the “lust