Digital Object Identifierhttps://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.22
https://orcid.org/0009-0005-0195-699XThis article argues that spatial dislocation and gendered spectatorship are inseparable in Haruki Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart (1999), a novel that spatial and feminist criticism has tended to approach separately. Reading its two defining spaces, a Swiss Ferris wheel and a Greek island, through Foucault’s heterotopology, Bachelard’s poetics of the threshold, Freud’s uncanny double and Mulvey’s theory of the gaze, it proposes that the locked gondola is a heterotopia of crisis and illusion in which Miu’s enforced spectatorship of her own double collapses Mulvey’s active/passive oscillation into a permanent partition. The island then exposes the limits of that partition: Miu’s body cannot answer Sumire’s desire, and Sumire dissolves. Because this scene stages desire between women, it exceeds Mulvey’s heterosexual model and is positioned against Morris’s reading through compulsory heterosexuality. Finally, adapting Tsang’s narrativised gaze structure, the article shows how the narrator K frames both women’s stories.
Thappa, Vishab. “Heterotopia, the Mirror, and the Gendered Gaze in Murakami’s Sputnik Sweetheart.” The Criterion: An International Journal in English, vol. 17, no. 5, Oct. 2026, pp. 383-410, https://doi.org/10.66376/criterion.v17.n5.22.
© 2026 The Author(s). Published by the Research Centre for English Language and Literature (RCELL) under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) licence.
← Back to Vol. 17, Issue 5 · Open Access · CC BY 4.0 · the-criterion.com