53 pages • 1 hour read
Haruki MurakamiA Wild Sheep Chase
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Legacy of Japanese History
Japan is depicted in this novel as a country with a complicated, war-torn history. Traces of this history are seen throughout the narrator’s quest for the sheep, and are manifested in the lives of the novel’s characters, many of whom seem to be suffering from a sort of spiritual restlessness. There is the Sheep Professor, who is haunted by the magical sheep that “invaded” him while he was in Manchuria; the Rat, who is constantly on the run from his own life; and the narrator himself, who no longer feels an attachment to his hometown, apart from his bond with an elderly Chinese bar owner, and is adrift in his Tokyo life.
What these characters all have in common is their sense of being exiles in their own country and the bewildered attachments that they have formed to places, or to entities, that are not quite theirs. The Rat spends his last days in his family’s former farmhouse, which was appropriated by the US Army during World War II and then given back to the town, which can no longer afford to maintain the house and the land around it. The Sheep Professor laments the Japanese view of sheep as nothing but farm animals; he tells the narrator that Japan has learned nothing from its contact with other Asian cultures, and reminds the narrator that “in one book published in the Yuan dynasty it’s written that a ‘star-bearing white sheep’ entered the body of Genghis Khan” (222). The narrator ends his quest for the sheep–perhaps this very same mythical star-bearing sheep–by giving all of the money that he has earned to the Chinese bar owner, a person whom he barely knows; the suggestion is that he has burned all of his bridges back in Tokyo and has no place left to go: “I brushed the sand from my trousers and got up, as if I had somewhere to go” (353).
The narrator’s girlfriend remarks to the narrator, while viewing a timeline against a history of the isolated small town of Junitaki, that, “[w]e seem to live from war to war” (247). Apart from World War II, the Russo Japanese War–which took place at the turn of the 20th century and was a battle between Japan and Russia for territories in Korea and Manchuria–is mentioned more than once. The Boss, who never appears in the book but is a powerful background figure in it, is as war-like and territorial in his way as Genghis Khan, and seems meant to be a modern version of him, as is underscored by his having been invaded by a sheep. He goes from being a drifter to a right-wing militant–the narrator’s partner tells the narrator that the Boss was a member of the Imperial Japanese Army–to a war criminal. At the time of the novel, he is the owner of a vast media and political empire, which is to say that he is a contemporary manifestation of a warlord.
The narrator, who works in advertising, lives in the Boss’s world, as do many of the other characters in the novel. As the narrator’s partner points out to him, everything is dependent on advertising, an industry on which the Boss has his thumb: “Why, ninety-five percent of the information that reaches you has already been preselected and paid for” (68). While the narrator does not seem overly upset or even surprised to hear this, there is also something in him that yearns to break out of his urban, corporate universe. Riding through small-town Japan with his girlfriend, and seeing some incongruous billboards, he notes, with characteristic ruefulness, “The new pioneers of advertising were carving a mean streak deep into the country” (249). He feels a rare peace and stillness up in the mountaintop farmhouse, and a sense of being absolutely alone; he is also saddened by the diminishing beachfront in his hometown, and the novel ends with him making a pilgrimage there. This divide in the narrator’s character–between jaded urban skeptic and earnest seeker of transcendence–can be seen to echo the divide in contemporary Japan, a modern, automated society that is built on one of the oldest civilizations in the world.
Time Passing
References to time passing abound in this novel, as if it is an event that needs pointing out, rather than simply the invisible current in which we all swim. We can infer from these numerous references that the narrator does not take the passage of time for granted, and instead has an uneasy fascination with it. He is haunted by its power to erase events and connections that were once important, such as his brief marriage; at the same time, he is aware of time’s power to smooth over difficulties, as is implied in the phrase–one that he uses, near the end of the novel, with the proprietor of the Dolphin Hotel–“Give it time” (351).
He is also aware of the ways in which people attempt to claim ownership of time and to divide it up for themselves, as is seen in his conversation with his girlfriend about how a flight, as opposed to a train ride, “saves time”: a phrase that is seen to make little sense, since, of course, time cannot be stopped or preserved. This argument echoes the Rat’s earlier observation, in his letter to the narrator, that, “We habitually cut out pieces of time to fit us, so we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that time is our size, but it really goes on and on” (94).
The narrator’s life in Tokyo is static and repetitive; as a city dweller, moreover, he is at some remove from the passage of the seasons that is lived through more deeply in rural and farming areas. It is therefore understandable that he should be bewildered by the passage of time, since it frequently seems to have little bearing on his life. He knows intellectually that he is growing older, and that he will die someday–it is significant that he is 29 years old, an age that for many signifies the onset of undeniable adulthood–but he does not feel any of the weight or gravitas that is supposed to come with age. He is a kind of ghost, and his urban existence, while comfortable and prosperous enough, is also a kind of living death. He must face the reality of his mortality in order to feel his own existence more fully.
There are two instances in the novel in which time stops, or appears to stop, and both of these instances terrify the narrator, rather than liberate him. Far from being a wish fulfillment of eternal youth, these instances are an encounter with death and nothingness. The first instance is the narrator’s confrontation with the Boss’s secretary, a man who has the capacity to sit still for hours, and has an ability to still and silence everything around him. When he first comes into his office, in which the narrator is waiting, he simply stares at the narrator, rather than greets him, a silence during which the narrator must remind himself, “Time was surely passing” (83). His first words to the narrator after this silence–a silence that reminds the narrator of “the silence that hangs around a terminal patient”–are, “Everyone dies” (124). It is a meeting that seems to anticipate the narrator’s later meeting with the Rat, during which the Rat insists on sitting in darkness and also on turning off the nearby grandfather clock. The Rat is, of course, an actual ghost, and it is possible that he does not like to hear the ticking of the clock because it reminds him of the life that he has left behind. He then tells the narrator to rewind the clock, before going back down the mountain, and to leave the house at precisely 930 a.m.
Religious Yearning in a Secular Age
The only character in this novel who speaks directly of God–and, as he claims, to God–is the Boss’s chauffeur, who is a minor character in the novel. However, he is far from the only character in the novel to have religious impulses, even if he is the only character who is guileless enough to admit to these impulses. The narrator’s quest for the sheep, as well as the Sheep Professor’s obsession with the sheep, both speak to a yearning for transcendence that is religious in origin even if it is not acknowledged as such. The narrator’s reaction to his girlfriend’s “unblocked ears” can also be seen to be a religious reaction, one that goes well beyond desire or even aesthetic appreciation. It is more like a sudden, flooding enlightenment, briefly changing the way that the narrator sees the world around him: “Never had I feasted my eyes on such beauty. Beauty of a variety I’d never imagined existed […] It transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness” (45). The narrator even refers to his girlfriend’s unblocked ears in semi-religious terms, calling them, “[t]he manifestation of her full splendor” (46). While this is consistent with the narrator’s generally jokey and ironical way of communicating, it is also something that he clearly means.
Another manifestation of religious feeling in this novel can be seen in its many prosaic descriptions of daily habits: eating, drinking, shopping, cleaning house. These are undramatic activities that another writer might avoid giving space to, and they serve to give this novel a quiet, meditative feeling, even while it is also full of strangeness and adventure. Over time, they take on the quality of religious ritual, as much as domestic ritual. This is seen most clearly during the narrator’s time up on the mountain, a time during which he cooks and cleans copiously. The meals that he cooks are given as much space as the ghosts he entertains and the long, lonely walks that he takes; all three activities are forms of meditation for the narrator, and are undertaken with equal solemn deliberateness: “The world shone moistly in the morning light. I made toast in a primitive toaster, the type were you turn the slices of bread by hand. I coated a frying pan with butter, fried a couple eggs sunnyside-up, drank two glasses of grape juice” (190).
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