“She could never decide on the big picture—what was necessary and what wasn’t. The following day when she reread what she’d printed out, every line looked absolutely essential.”

Sumire is characterized by her lack of direction and inability to fully commit to a way forward in life. This is reflected in her writing style, introducing the theme of Writing as a Representation of State of Mind. She cannot finish any project she begins, only able to write a beginning or end, and her inability to edit demonstrates her feelings of listlessness. However, she also believes that everything she writes is essential, which shows a commitment to her craft.

“Sumire arrived at my apartment a little before five. I didn’t recognize her. She’d taken on a complete change of style. Her hair was cut stylishly short, her bangs still showing traces of the scissors’ snips. She wore a light cardigan over a short-sleeve, navy-blue dress, and a pair of black enamel, medium-high heels.”

When Sumire falls in love with Miu, it is all-consuming and changes the trajectory of Sumire’s life, illustrating the theme of Personal Growth Due to Unrequited Desire. She begins to dress differently, working with Miu and abandoning writing. K sees this difference in her appearance, with Sumire's new wardrobe and hairstyle demonstrating her commitment to life with Miu, and the very specific visual imagery details her transformation, heightening understanding of its drastic nature.

“Sumire could make out clearly her own figure reflected deep inside Miu’s dark eyes. It looked to her like her own soul being sucked into the other side of a mirror. Sumire loved that vision, and at the same time it frightened her.”

Eyes again appear in the narrative to develop characters and hint at something deeper below the surface, reintroducing the idea of another layer of reality. In this excerpt, Sumire feels as though she is being sucked into Miu’s eyes, an image that both captures the nature of Sumire’s unrequited desire for Miu and foreshadows Sumire’s disappearance. When Sumire follows Miu to Greece, she disappears, possibly traveling to a different reality, as though she actually is “sucked into the other side of a mirror.”

“Miu examined the color of the 1986 Médoc and then, as if savoring some nicely turned out prose, carefully tasted it.”

The simile used here to characterize Miu’s approach to wine is one that develops her identity as a refined and cultured woman. By comparing her savoring of the wine to savoring prose, the narrative juxtaposes the appreciation of two different elements of culture. The reference to prose also subtly references K, who frames her appreciation in terms that would resonate with a lover of literature like himself.

“Say you were writing about the seashore in May. You can hear the sound of the wind in your ears and smell the salt air. You can feel the soft warmth of the sun on your arms. If you wrote about a small room filled with tobacco smoke, you can bet the reader would start to feel like he can’t breathe. And his eyes would smart. Prose like that is beyond most writers. Your writing has the living, breathing force of something natural flowing through it.”

To explain to Sumire how vivid her writing is, K uses imagery to illustrate its power. He believes that her writing creates a sense within the readers that they are living what she is writing. Their senses respond to her words, bringing her writing to life, offering another example of another reality in the novel.

“I had no idea what to say. A silence descended on us as sudden as the instant fresh oil is poured into a large frying pan.”

In this excerpt, Murakami uses a dramatic simile to create a sense of severity. He describes the arrival of silence as though it were oil poured into a frying pan. When oil is poured into a hot frying pan, the sound of it sizzling is immediate and violent, a raucous moment that disrupts silence. By describing the sudden silence as all-encompassing as violent noise, Murakami conveys its intensity.

“Unlike other people she honestly, sincerely, wanted to hear what I had to say. I did my best to answer her, and our conversations helped me open up more about myself to her—and, at the same time, to myself.”

K and Sumire share a strong and meaningful relationship that goes beyond friendship, despite its lack of romantic overtone. Through Sumire, K better understands himself, leading to growth. The emphasis he places on the words “honestly” and “sincerely” highlights his vulnerability with Sumire, an openness he doesn’t offer to anyone else.

“Suddenly I found it hard to breathe, and my field of vision narrowed. Time stood still, spinning its wheels. Desire swelled up in my trousers, hard as a rock. I was confused, bewildered. I tried to get a grip. I breathed in a lungful of fresh air, closed my eyes, and in that incomprehensible darkness I slowly began counting. My urges were so overpowering that tears came to my eyes.”

K’s desire for Sumire is intense, and he struggles throughout the novel with how to handle it. When he feels his desire build, he has a physical and emotional reaction from trying to keep it contained, conveyed by specific sensory imagery in this passage. He cannot think straight and must remove himself from reality to fight the urges he feels.

“I imagined being held by that lithe, slim body. All sorts of obscene images came to mind as I lay in bed, in the same room with her, and I felt these thoughts gradually pushing me to some other place. I think I got a little too worked up.”

Sumire undergoes a similar journey with unrequited desire as K. Her devotion to and obsession with Miu overtake her life, and she feels as though this desire controls her. When she writes to K, she describes how she found herself in “some other place,” implying a move away from reality and control, a reaction very similar to K’s own to his desire for Sumire.

“She was far far away. And most likely that was the future in a nutshell, Sumire growing ever more distant. It made me sad. I felt like I was a meaningless bug clinging for no special reason to a high stone wall on a windy night, with no plans, no beliefs. Sumire said she missed me. But she had Miu beside her. I had no one. All I had was—me. Same as always.”

As K begins to believe that he will lose his friendship with Sumire entirely because of her love for Miu, he compares his emotions to those of a bug. The simile of a bug clinging to a wall on a windy night captures his state of mind and perspective. He describes the bug as meaningless and having no special reason, plans, or beliefs, reflecting his own feelings of isolation, which prevent him from connecting with others and building a life with anyone. The wind that threatens to dislodge the bug represents the uncontrollable power of Sumire’s desire for Miu. She cannot control it, and because K depends on his relationship with Sumire, he is also at the mercy of her desire.

“My mind was a blank, a rice paddy in the middle of a rainstorm, and I couldn’t figure out what was going on. The bedsheets still retained a faint memory of the afternoon’s lovemaking, and reality was one step out of line, a cardigan with the buttons done up wrong.”

This excerpt features two similes. The first compares K’s mind to a rice paddy in a rainstorm, blurred and featureless, reflecting the idea that his mind is blank. The second simile captures the growing sense of unreality that K feels. He feels it to be a subtle disruption, comparing it to a buttoned cardigan with the buttons out of place. There suggests that the line between reality and unreality is slightly blurred, not immediately noticeable, but palpable.

“I woke in an unpleasant sweat, my shirt plastered to my chest. My body was listless, my legs swollen. I felt as if I’d swallowed an overcast sky whole.”

This simile uses weather to capture K’s emotions. He wakes up unsettled, unrested, and compares these feelings to having an overcast sky inside him. An overcast sky may spur feelings of gloom and a lack of motivation, the same feelings that K experiences upon waking. This reference also again raises the idea of a person’s interior being a different reality.

“I never had a cat again. I still like cats, though I decided at the time that that poor little cat who climbed the tree and never returned would be my first and last cat. I couldn’t forget that little cat and start loving another.”

Sumire’s devotion to her cat and her inability to move on from it after its death highlight her central characteristic: a singular devotion to passion, whether it be writing or Miu. She is engrossed in her desire for Miu and cannot imagine a life without her. Her experience with the cat foreshadows the idea that Sumire is capable of loving only one person at a time, and possibly only one person in her life.

“When Miu went back to into her room, Sumire’s eyes were open. A thin translucent veil seemed to cover them, but a glimmer of consciousness had returned. Sumire lay there, the covers up to her shoulders.”

Imagery of eyes again plays a central role in the narrative of Sputnik Sweetheart. In this instance, when Sumire appears in Miu’s room late at night, Miu looks into Sumire’s eyes and barely recognizes her friend in them. As before, eyes are used to contribute to the sense of unreality in the novel: Although Sumire’s body is in front of Miu, she is in a different reality, far away from Miu and the room.

“Sumire might very well have been pondering the sexual desire she felt. The same way I thought about my own sexual desire when I was with her. It wasn’t hard for me to understand how she felt. Sumire pictured Miu naked beside her and wanted nothing so much as to hold her tight.”

Despite the distance between them during much of the novel, K and Sumire are connected, most notably through their common experience of unrequited desire. As Sumire pines for Miu, K can understand her struggle, picturing how she feels the same way as he does when he desires Sumire. K is aware of the turmoil within Sumire and understands how disorienting he can be, strengthening his connection to her.

“As I said before, inside of us what we know and what we don’t know share the same abode. For convenience’ sake most people erect a wall between them. It makes life easier. But I just swept that wall away. I had to. I hate walls. That’s just the kind of person I am.”

This excerpt captures a sentiment common in Murakami’s writing: Each person constructs reality within themselves. Sumire determines that every person holds what they know and don’t know within them, separated by a wall. When Sumire lets that wall within her crumble, she cannot distinguish between reality and unreality. This idea of a wall is also explored in Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The City and Its Uncertain Walls.

“In dreams you don’t need to make any distinctions between things. Not at all. Boundaries don’t exist. So in dreams there are hardly ever collisions. Even if there are, they don’t hurt. Reality is different. Reality bites.”

One of the ways that Sumire differentiates reality and unreality is through dreams. She describes dreams as a space in which consciousness does not need to separate the real and unreal. They coexist, the mind making sense of everything. However, in reality, people are forced to reckon with conflicting thoughts and events, and the violent image of reality biting highlights its visceral nature.

“Like some ancient animal coming to life, the Ferris wheel clattered and began to turn. The assorted throng of booths and attractions shrank below her. As they did, the lights of the city rose up before her. The lake was on her left-hand side, and she could see lights from excursion boats reflected gently on the surface of the water. The distant mountainside was dotted with lights from tiny villages. Her chest tightened at the beauty of it all.”

Murakami uses vivid imagery to set the scene of Miu’s experience of unreality. Not only does he use a simile to describe the Ferris wheel as an ancient animal, suggesting that it may have a mind of its own, he uses the surroundings to develop Miu’s emotions. She watches the town from the wheel, seeing the beauty of a place that she is slowly losing faith in and feeling increasingly distant and disconnected from.

“I’m in love with Miu. With the Miu on this side, needless to say. But I also love the Miu on the other side just as much. The moment this thought struck me it was like I could hear—with an audible creak—myself splitting in two. As if Miu’s own split became a rupture that had taken hold of me. The feeling was overpowering, and I knew there was nothing I could do to fight it.”

Sumire’s unrequited desire for Miu places her in a difficult position, in which she must manage her intense feelings in a way that does not threaten her relationship. When she learns that Miu feels like she was split in two, the possibility that there may be another Miu who would love Sumire back thrills her. This possibility results in an internal shift, in which Sumire splits herself. Now, there is one half of her that must face her feelings for Miu in reality, and another who may search for a loving Miu elsewhere.

“The coolness of the night washed into me. Suddenly a thought struck me-maybe, at this very moment, Sumire was listening to the same music.”

When K encounters unreality, hearing music in the middle of the night that he cannot locate, he begins to wonder about Sumire’s own experiences, wondering if they are sharing the same unreality. This is a moment of connection in which he can visualize sharing something with Sumire, just as in the scene in Chapter 16, when he knows they are looking at the same moon.

“Like the tide receding, the shoreline washed clean, with Sumire gone I was left in a distorted, empty world. A gloomy, cold world in which what she and I had had would never ever take place again.”

Murakami uses this simile to capture the disorienting loneliness K feels. Without Sumire, he feels lost, as though the world he knew is gone. Murakami compares this to the shoreline being remade by a receding tide. While the tide is in, the higher waves wash the sand clean, removing small rocks, shells, and footprints in the sand. When the tide completely recedes, it is as though nothing and no one was there, erasing the history.

“A stillborn smile played around his lips, yet his eyes remained those of a deep-sea predator, searching my depths for the slightest movement.”

When K meets the security guard from the grocery store, he immediately characterizes the man through his eyes. As before, Murakami uses the man’s eyes to reveal his essential characteristics. In this excerpt, he describes the hostile guard as having eyes like a “deep-sea predator.” These eyes stare into K, as though he is hunting, looking for a way to attack.

“Being all alone is like the feeling you get when you stand at the mouth of a large river on a rainy evening and watch the water flow into the sea.”

When K describes loneliness to Carrot, he does so with a simile. He compares it to watching where a river meets the sea, capturing the feeling of loneliness in two ways. The first is the fresh water flowing into the salt water. The smaller amount of water coming from the river is subsumed into the ocean, where it becomes saltwater. This reflects an individual losing their identity as they enter society. The other image is of looking out at a vast expanse of water, where there is nothing but water, an isolating and spare scene.