Wild Sheep Chase (1982) is the final part of the Rat trilogy that features the frequent customer of a small bar nicknamed Rat and the narrator known only as Watashi (I). This is an example of hard-boiled detective fiction influenced by Raymond Chandler but set in Japan. At the start of the novel, the narrator reminisces about university... These are the days he spent drinking and socialising. He reflects about a girl he knew who wanted to die. She slept with anyone but feels shut out when she has sex with the narrator. This is a significant observation as it is a theme that runs throughout Murakami's writing, the detachment of his characters who are eventually confronted by their lack of wamth and feelings. Murakami is very specific with detail: He describes exactly what the narrator eats, how he cooks his food, what he wears and what music he listens to. The reader isn't just given a time frame for the novel, the reader is given the exact time, July 24, 6.30 am (page 14). Given this attention to detail, the reader's senses are heightened. When the narrator's divorce is mentioned (page 17) it is no surprise given the fact that the girl he slept with at university felt 'shut out'... There is a sense of foreboding established within the first two chapters as the narrator recounts the death by suicide of the girl he slept with at university and then his divorce. Typically his wife didn't want to leave him, but she she felt like she was going nowhere with him. The narrator observes, "We had been walking ever so peacefully down a long blind alley. That was our end" (21).
This sense of foreboding isd maintained at the aquarium where the narrator is struck by a whale's penis... He notes that "In the aquarium of my memory, it is always late autumn" (26). He has a new girlfriend with three jobs (27). He sees her ears in an advertisement and has the photographs enlarged and taped to the wall of his apartment (29) Like the whale's penis they have been separated or are removed from their natural context and are given a surreal significance that is disorienting. The narrator himself has survived a number of disorienting experiences, the suicide of the girl he slept with at university and then his divorce. The detail provided by the clothes he wears, the food he eats and the music he listens to is important because it stops him from disappearing. It is significant that after his divorce he often conjures up the memory of his wife's slip on the back a chair. Her absence is defined by this slip. It is no surprise that he feels a sense of helplessness, "like some great whirlpool of fate sucking me in" (29). His girlfriend tells the narrator that he is only half living (40). He wonders, "Had somebody else been living my life all the time? (41). The vaccum or hollow nature of the narrator is threatening to overcome the narrator but he is unable to resd the signs. It is his girlfriend who senses that an important phone call is coming... All she knows is that is has something to do with a sheep.
The 'wild adventure' she anticipates beging when the narrator meets a strange man with a tan that "could only have been the result of some unknown sun shining in some skies" (52). There are clues aplenty that the world with which the narrator has failed to engage is disappearing. And it is being replaced by the 'worm universe' at the centre of which is the sheep. It is the sheep that draws the narrator to the boss, a major right wing figure who, he learns, is in a coma. The boss has had a brain hemorrhage... And the key to finding a successor is the sheep. The narrator is the only person who can provide a clue to the whereabouts of the sheep. He used a photograph taken by his friend by the Rat for an advertisement. It turns out that the sheep that everyone is looking for is in the photograph. The only problem is that they have to find out where the phjotograph was taken. And the narrator hasn't heard from his friend for some time. In a rare letter from the Rat the narrator had previsouly learned that he was heading north, "I've come to where I was meant to come" (80). It might as well, he says of the landscape "be the end of the world" (81). In relation to the photograph, the Rat asks that the narrator publish it where it can be seen. The photograph is important to the Rat although he says mysteriously "I can't tell you the reason why, though" (83).
The narrative concerning the narator's visit to the boss' right hand man is interspersed with a description of the Rat's letters and a trip back to the narrator's hometown after a four year absence. He is there to see J, the Chinese barkeeper, and to say farewell to the Rat's girlfriend. J expresses his discontent with the development in the twon. "They bulldoze the hills to put up houses, haul the dirt to the sea for landfill, then go and build there too. And they think it's all proper and fine" (88). The narrator goes for a walk to his favourite spot on the river. He observes that "The town belonged to the river from the very beginning, and it would always be that way" (91). But he also observes that all that was left of his favourite spot was fifty yards of oceanfront, "Fifty yards of of honest-to-goodness shoreline. If you overlooked the fact that it was hemmed in by thirty-foot high concrete walls" (91). Of the view he says, "Instead of ocean, a vast expanse of reclaimed land and housing developments met my eyes. Faceless blocks of apartments, the miserable foundations of an attempt to build a neighbourhood" (92). The narrator's outrage can be described as a "distant voice like an echo from the bottom of a well" (95). This image which takes on extra significance in the Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, is repeated. Elsewhere Murakami refers to a "pebble plunging down fathomless wells" (108).
The visit to the boss' right hand man sees the narrator go off on a wild sheep chase to Hokkaido in search of the chestnut coloured sheep with the star on its back. The significance of the sheep is explained by the boss' hallucinatory dreams. The boss, it appears, was possesed by th spirit of the sheep while he was in Manchuria during the 1930. Upon returning to Japan he was arrested by the American military but after a period of time was released back into the community. As a result of his hallucinatory dreams he was able to build up a "tremendously sophisticated organisation" (118). The only ones to know the facts are the U.S. military who had kept him under observation at the time and the boss himself. The boss' right-hand man tells the narrator that it is impertaive that they find the sheep as "When the king dies, the kingdom crumbles" (118). The boss' right-hand man then expounds upon his theory of the mediocrity of the '60s generation that attempted an "expansion of cosciousness" but lacked will. It is will that the boss provides that has enabled the organisation to create a "magnificent palace" which isn now threatened by the propect of the wholf of the country being turned into a "public housing complex" (119). Ironically he dreads the same "uniform rows of public housing" and a Japan "leveled of mountians, coastlines or lakes" (119) like the narrator. In order to make sure that this doesn't happen they must find the sheep.
At first the narrator isn't convinced that it is worth his while to travel to Hokkaido in search of the sheep. He tells his girlfriend that it is impossible to find one sheep among hundreds of thousands. She corrects him and tells him that there are, in fact, only five thousand sheep in Hokkaido. She has done some research in the library and reassures him that the task is not impossoible. The narrator feels resnetful, however, about being "ordered and threatened and pushed around" (135). She convinces him to go by suggesting that the Rat may be "up to his neck in trouble?" Tying her hair back and showing him her ears, which he can't resist, they go to bed. His girlfriend asks him later if it has been a long ten years and he says "Along long time. Practically endless" (142). The narrator feels "truly alive" when he makes love to his girlfriend on the sofa. Significantly when she smiles he feels that it is a smile that he had seen before but couldn't remember where or when, He notes that "Women with their clothes off have a frightening similarity." She reassures him and says that when they go and look for the sheep "things'll fall into place" (143). Both the Rat and the narrator's girlfriend guide the narrator to compkete a mission for which he has little inclination or understanding. He is in a sense a less evolved being than them despite his obvious sense and sensibility. Significantly, the narrator refers to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes and quotes the opening sentence "My colleague Watson is limited in his thinking to rather narrow confines, but possesses the utmost tenacity." Of this sentence the narrator says, "Not bad for a lead-in sentence" (144). The reality is, of course, that the narrator is revealing his own limitations through the use of this quotation. When his girlfriend leaves eventually leaves him in Junitaki, there is a sense of inevitability despite his sense of bewilderment. This is how the narrow confines of his own thinking are revealed. He senses that she exists outside of time but he has no idea how she functions in his life, both providing him with the information he needs and the guidance he needs in order to help his friend and bring the trilogy to a conclusion.
It is his girlfriend who chooses the Dolphin Hotel saying she had "already got an image of a place." When they arrived there it was not 'Particularly old; still it was strikingly rundown" (163). Despite the narrator telling her that they could have stayed in a better hotel with all the money they have been given, she says "It's not a question of money. Our sheep hunt begins here. No argument, it had to be here" (166). Her awareness of the task on hand is on another level to that of the narrator who seems only concerned about his own comfort and how to spend the money that they have been given. They spend their first few days looking for a clue that may help them in their search for the sheep. After a while the narrator discovers from the clerk at the Dolphin Hotel that the hotel used to be the Hokkaido Ovine Hall. Furthermore the clerk is able to show them a photograph on the walls that shows the same scenery as in the photograph taken by the Rat. The narrator observes "Just great... Allt his time we've been passing right under this photograph." His girlfriend blurts out "That's why I told you it had to be at the Dolphin Hotel" (178). The narrator hasn't quite come to grips yet with the nature of the task that he has been given. In order to help them locate the scenery in the photograph, the clerk sends them upstairs to meet his father, the sheep professor.
The clerk recounts his father, the sheep professor's life story. After an excellent academic career he went to Korea toconduct resarch into rice cultivation. After that he was sent to Manchuria to develop a self-sufficiency program based on sheep. Here he disappeared for several days. After claiming that he had had a special relationships with a sheep he was sent back to Tokyo in disgrace. Having been pruged from his elite post he was abandoned by the sheep that had possessed him. Eventually he became the director of the Hokkaido Ovine Association before opening the Dolphin Hotel. The sheep professor has no interest in talking to the narrator until he is shown thre cigarette lighter with the image of the sheep engraved upon it. The professor then describes his life since he was abandoned by thre sheep. "It's hell. A maze of a subterranean hell... That's been my life for fourty-two years" (186). The sheep he says came back to japan with him with a "monumental plan to to transform humanity and the human world" (189). The sheep professor says that before the narrator another young man had been to the hotel asking about the photograph. That of course was the Rat. After telling his story the sheep professor tells the narrator where to find the location in the photograph.
The narrator's journey takes him and his girlfriend to the town of Junitaki established by an Ainu youth and eighteen dirt farmers in the nineteenth century. The site for the village was chosen because of its inacessability. The dirt farmers didn't want to be found. The narrator upon his arrival in the village describes it as a "singularly dull town" (210). Having discovered from one of the the locals where the sheep farm was located, the narrator is annoyed with himself for forgetting that the Rat's father had a vacation villa in Hokkaido. He says of himself, "I always remember important details long afterward" (224). The caretaker agrees to give them a lift to the villa in his car but warned them that the road might be unpassable and they may need to walk part of the way, which is what they have to do. The narrator says "We were totally alone. As if we'd been dropped off at the edge of thew world" (233). They arrive at the villa and find that it is empty. There is no sign of the Rat. The narrator asks his girlfriend if her ears are telling her anything but she says she can't open them because she will get a headache. They decide to wait for the Rat. The narrator goes to sleep on the sofa and when he awakes he knows that his girlfriend has gone. He fills his time waiting for the Rat to come by continuing to read Sherlock Holmes.
Of course the Rat doesn't come, or rather when he does come he is not the same old Rat that the narrator is expecting. It is the sheep man who at two o'clock announcing his arrival with three knocks on the door. They share a drink and the sheep man tells the narrator that he gave his girlfriend a lift out of the valley. She went back to the Dolphin Hotel. The sheepman tells the narrator off for confusing his girlfriend. He says "All you think about is yourself" (252). The sheep man tells the narrator that she "wasn't meant to come here." Finally he tells the narrator "You'll never see that woman again... Because you only thought about yourself" (253). The narrator tells the sheep man that he is waiting for hisa friend but thr sheep man seems uninterested. he says he will be back in a few days.
After several days waiting the narrator sees the newspaper clipping in the living room which had advertised thre fact that he was looking for the Rat and he realises that the Rat knows he is looking for him. This raises a whole lot of questions and he comes to the realisation tat the rat doesn't want to face him. Yet he wasn't rejecting him either. he suspects that the sheep man knows something. The narrator goes out for a walk and has a second encounter with the sheep man. Back at the villa he reads a book about pan-Asianists and discovers that the right wing boss had grown up in a poor farming community in Hokkaido which was, of course, Junitaki. The narrator realises the boss would know that h would eventually discover this and he wonders if he is to be a pawn why he wasn't told in the first place? He realises that "At every turn, I'd been way off base, way off the mark" (266). With the arrival of the snow comes the narrator's third encounter witht erh sheep man. he expresses anger thatb his friend ahsn't come to see him and thre sheep man is unnerved. Looking into a mirror the narrator notices that there was no reflection of the sheep man in the mirror. "In the mirror world" observes the narrator, "I was alone. Terror shot through my spine" (272). In the darkness the narrator reflects on time and decided to let time carry him to "where a new darkness was configuring yet newer patterns" (275). It is at this point that the Rat arrives.
The Rat tells the narrator about his suicide and how it was the only way to kill the sheep. He had been drawn up to the farm by the story of the sheep with the star on its back. Once he had been possessed he says that he had no choice, but to kill himself. "If I had waited, the sheep would have contrrolled me absolutely. It was my last chance" (281). One last thing remains to be done, however. This is why the rat lured the narrator to the farm. The Rat had been chosen by the sheep to create a "realm of total conceptual anarchy. A scheme in which all opposites would be resolved into unity. With me and the sheep at the centre" (284). The Rat, however, for reasons unknown to himself was not convinced. In the morning on the Rat's instructions the narrator connects some wires and winds up the clock. As he connects the wires the sheep man reassures him while his ex-wife tells him that the "cells replace themselves" as she holds on to her white slip. His girlfriend then accuses him of not knowing anything to which he agrees. After that the narrator does as he is told and leaves the valley. On his way down from the mountain he meets the boss' right hand man who tells him "I've got him right where I want him." The narrator takes his car and boards a train at the station. In the distance he hears an explosion. "It's all over" says the sheep professor... Heading back to Tokyo, the narrator stops in and sees J. Handing over a substantial amount of money he tells J that as his new partner, he wants a pinball and jukebox machine.
