"You gather up bones and make your gate, but no matter how wonderful the gate might be, that alone doesn’t make it a living, breathing novel. A story is not something of this world. A real story requires a kind of magical baptism to link the world on this side with the world on the other side."
This quote, especially when the reader first sees it, is just a metaphor, a way for K. to explain how to craft a story. Yet when we look back on this quote we see that this itself is the story in a nutshell. What K. and Sumire desires isn't of this world, it simply doesn't exist. Because of the magical baptism, similar to the disappearance of the cat, Sumire, and K. go to this other world at the end of the book
"I spread my fingers apart and stare at the palms of both hands, looking for bloodstains. There aren’t any. No scent of blood, no stiffness. The blood must have already, in its own silent way, seeped inside."
Note: This Quote can be interpreted in many ways, similar to the content of other Murakami novels.
In the end, K. gets a supposed phone call from Sumire, something that seems impossible, too good to be true. After K. picks up the phone, we see not the new Sumire, but the old one, the one K. fell in love with. This above quote can be connected to another important quote "Can a gun be fired, yet no blood shed? Likewise, Murakami implies that K. killed himself and doing so met again Sumire in the other world.
Did you ever see anyone shot by a gun without bleeding?
This question might seem so on the surface but it has the deepest of meanings. Instead of seeing the gun as a gun, imagine the gun as a portal from one world to another, from reality to the land of the dream. In the story, there are 4 instances of this gun being fired,
1. The cat disappears from the top of the tree.
2. Sumire disappears.
3. Myu loses her sexual desire and piano playing ability (a little different as she loses half of herself)
4. K. at the end of the book when he moves into the other world yet "no scent of blood, no stiffness."
"That we were wonderful traveling companions but in the end no more than lonely lumps of metal on their own separate orbits. From far off they look like beautiful shooting stars, but in reality, they're nothing more than prisons, where each of us is locked up alone, going nowhere. When the orbits of these two satellites of ours happened to cross paths, we could be together. Maybe even open our hearts to each other. But that was only for the briefest moment. In the next instant, we'd be in absolute solitude. Until we burned up and became nothing.”
This quote finally explains the title of the book "Sputnik Sweetheart". This quote was basically metaphorically describing the relationship between Myu and Sumire and showed that in the end that everything was going to burn up, Sumire disappear, and Miu left in an empty shell, (and maybe K. burned up as well)
"Don’t pointless things have a place, too, in this far-from-perfect world? Remove everything pointless from an imperfect life and it’d lose even its imperfection."
K. begins the book by telling the reader about Sumire's life and how she became what she is today. In a way, he hints that Sumire's path to glory, her passageway of becoming a writer is pointless (maybe even hinting she dies) but that she still has a place, and that he will join her there (See quotes above).
