Reviewing a single novel by Murakami without discussing his other works is like trying to walk up a steep embankment of newly cut grass after a summer rain in bowling shoes. It's difficult to keep from slipping. Plot details and character delineation from one tale seep into the next. You've encountered an inscrutable/mysterious/doomed woman? Hm, could be A Wild Sheep Chase; Dance, Dance, Dance; Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; Norwegian Wood; South of the Border, West of the Sun; Sputnik Sweetheart; or The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. The (always) male first-person narrator is hopelessly/tragically/strangely in love with her? Oh, in that case, we can rule out … um … well, none. She mysteriously disappears? Whew. We can rule out Hard-Boiled Wonderland. A reader might finally distinguish Murakami's latest novel, Sputnik Sweetheart, by the telling detail of "inscrutable woman whom the narrator hopelessly loves is in love with another woman."

I'm never quite sure how to interpret such repetition (so dependable it's practically a template of the author's works). Should I view Murakami as a modern-day Monet, painting the Rouen Cathedral over and over in different light in an attempt to better understand his subject? Or maybe he's more akin to a priest chanting obscure Latin verses over and over in an effort to rid his world of a particularly stubborn demon. Then again, he could just be in a sustained rut.

Regardless the answer, one shouldn't read Sputnik Sweetheart with the aim of finding something that Murakami hasn't done before. Quite the opposite, the novel is most noteworthy for those further examples it supplies of those things that he has done so well before: there is the signature conflation of genre — here mystery, epistolary and romance; the discomforting transformation of the mundane into the strange; and the embedding of suggestive vignettes that grow in significance as the novel unfolds.