A Wild Sheep Chase

 A Wild Sheep Chase

By Haruki Murakami

My second Murakami in a row. It's becoming a thing. In this story, an unnamed narrator is dealing with a

recent divorce when his life is upended again. He is in advertising and a recent pamphlet he put together has drawn the attention of a powerful, shadowy figure, known as the Boss, supposedly at the center of Japan's politics and media. At issue is a photograph of a meadow of sheep, which features among the flock a strange-looking specimen with a star on its rear. This sheep, it turns out, has some mystical powers; it can "enter" people, as it did the Boss, and guide their behavior to its own ends. Recently, the sheep left the Boss, and it becomes the narrator's job to find the sheep again. Or else. The magical and mystic aside, what ensues is a fairly straightforward detective/hero's quest story -- until the end, when those elements come to the forefront.

I was struck by how different the tone of this book was from Killing Commendatore. It is funny and fast-paced. Perhaps "sharp" is the word for it. Where Commendatore lulled me into a kind of trance, this one felt more like a page turner. I fear that the plot and pacing kept me reading at the surface level. I had a harder time keeping the ideas behind the story in my head as I read. 

But I did manage to jot down a line that I think was at the heart of the story (and which Murakami explores again and again): "My placing a photo of sheep in the life insurance company's bulletin can be seen from one perspective, (a) as coincidence, but from another perspective, (b) as no coincidence at all" (72).  And so the book is really about the extent to which we really control our own lives. Which is not to say it is a rumination on predestination. I think it is more of a caution to think about whether our individual actions, supposedly taken of our own accord, are actually the result of societal pressure designed by elites for the benefits of elites. Are we merely members of a flock blindly following an alpha sheep we don't really know is there?

Which speaks to the book's sense of humor. The word "alpha" doesn't really come to mind when thinking of sheep. This is one way in which Murakami upends the literary traditions he borrows from -- and maybe parodies? -- as he tells his tale. In place of a Chandler-type hard-boiled detective, we have a fairly passive (sheepish?) main character with no name who, though he certainly consumes his fair share of whiskey, kind of stumbles along his journey. His femme fatale is described as fairly plain -- except for her magical ears. Or instead of an Arthurian quest in search for a holy grail we have a guy looking for, well, sheep. 

Onward to Kafka on the Shore! 

Killing Commendatore

Killing Commendatore

By Haruki Murakami

It did not take long to find parallels between this novel, Murakami's latest, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which I read last year and loved. The main character is an easy-going, quiet middle-aged man who, out of the blue, loses his wife. A New York Times review of Killing Commendatore referred to this character as "Murakami Man", not rich but not in need of money, into art and music and cats, reflective to the extreme, and confused more than afraid in the face of supernatural events. And, of course, in search of a lost mate. 

And there is a hole. In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, the hole serves as a type of portal to an underworld that allows the character to see the machinations that make the above-ground "wind-up" world run. A pit in Killing Commendatore plays a similar role. It is buried, and subsequently uncovered, behind the main character's rented house in the mountains when a mysterious ringing begins to emanate from it in the middle of the night. 

Which leads to the most obvious connection of all: the supernatural. In this novel, it begins with the main character's discovery, in the attic of his rented home, of a painting by the once-famous artist who lived there. It is a rendering of a scene from the opera Don Giovanni called Killing Commendatore. It turns out to be an allegory for a botched assassination plot in which the artist was involved when he lived in Nazi-era Vienna in his youth. The uncovering of the painting beckons other-worldly figures into the character's life. The main one explains that he is an Idea and he appears before the main as a miniature, two-foot version of the Commendatore in the painting. 

Not long after his first appearance, a conversation between the two reveals what I think is the premise of the book: "The question is whether or not an idea can be treated as an autonomous entity, right?" Put another way, the book explores the power that art, and the ideas it contains, has on the world. On the one hand, it seems to suggest that once art is put into the world, the artist no longer can control the ideas it unleashes. It is for this reason that several of the main character's paintings -- he, too, is an artist -- are left unfinished. He explains that it would be "too dangerous" to complete them and unleash the ideas contained within into the world. On the other hand, it explores the way that our individual ideas, the stories we tell ourselves, can end up controlling us. Across the valley from the main character, for example, lives Menshiki, a wealthy man obsessed with the idea that he might be the father of a child to the point that he moves into a a hill-top mansion just so he can spend his evenings spying on his would-be daughter through a pair of high-powered binoculars. It is Menshiki, playing the role of a winder-upper, who sets most of the book's "action", if it can be called that, into motion. He commissions the main character to paint a portrait of his perhaps-daughter, which leads to a relationship with her aunt, which leads to the daughter's resentment and curiosity, which leads to her becoming trapped in the mansion, which leads the main character's descent into the land of Metaphor to free her. Significantly, Menshiki says he doesn't want to know if he truly is a father; it is the idea that he MIGHT be that he is obsessed with -- and which causes so many problems. So what's the message here? That we need to interrogate our "truths" lest the leads us astray? But, then again, the main character ultimately reconnects with his wife, who has a baby that may or may not be his, and he, too, expresses ambivalence about the "truth" and winds up happy. So how to reconcile these?

There is, in the end, much that is irreconcilable about the book. At the end, the main character and the young girl he "rescues" talk about their experiences. They decide that the opening of the pit opened a circle that unleashed their adventure. Did they close the circle? They don't know. Neither does the reader. The main character's strange adventure and the girl's entrapment are never really connected. The book seems more like a musing than a coherent thought. 

But that is just fine by me. I wasn't after a statement -- I was after a mood. There is something about Murakami's storytelling and prose that I find mesmerizing. Reading his books is like falling into a trance. It strikes me that his books, where the real and unreal, the supernatural and the mundane mix so freely is a pretty good reflection of these pandemic times. And by immersing myself in his strange world I was, for an hour or so a night, able to escape my own.