Haruki Murakami · 1999 · exile

Haruki Murakami's 1999 novel. K loves Sumire, Sumire loves her older employer Miu, and Miu cannot love anyone - three people in separate orbits, like the satellite the title names. A business trip through Italy and France ends on a small Greek island, where Sumire walks out of her room one night and does not come back.

1. 1
   Tokyo

   Sumire wants to be a novelist and writes only beginnings. She meets Miu at a wedding in Akasaka, takes a job as her secretary, moves to Yoyogi-Uehara and stops writing - and K, a primary teacher, watches it happen.

2. 2
   Milan

   The European trip begins as business, buying wine. Sumire writes to K on hotel stationery about a life she does not recognise as hers: good clothes, expensive restaurants and a woman she cannot stop looking at.

3. 3
   Rome

   The first letter reaches Tokyo from Rome, saying she will be home around the fifteenth of August - the last ordinary sentence anybody gets from her, and one the novel quietly does not honour.

4. 4
   Venice

   A Vivaldi festival, and then back to Milan to fly north. Murakami keeps the itinerary precise and the feeling vague, which is the effect the whole first half is built on.

5. 5
   Paris

   North to France, and the trip stops looking like work. Sumire's letters to K get longer and more searching - what desire is, whether she should say anything to Miu, and what she is supposed to do with the answer.

6. 6
   Burgundy

   At a friend's house in a village Miu tells the story of the Swiss ferris wheel: trapped overnight, looking through opera glasses into her own window, and seeing herself with a man she was afraid of. Her hair went white in a night.

7. 7
   Rhodes

   They abandon the plan to go home and take the friend's villa in Greece instead. Rhodes is where the ferry goes from, and where K will land in a panic weeks later with no idea what he is looking for.

8. 8
   The island

   A small unnamed island near the Turkish border. Sumire tells Miu she loves her, is gently refused, and vanishes in the night in silk pyjamas and sandals - and K searches an island with one road and finds a floppy disk.