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.
Character Analysis
The Narrator
The narrator of the novel is unnamed, making him seem both familiar and anonymous. He is 29 years old–the same age as his friend, the Rat—and works at a small advertising agency: a quintessentially modern, urban occupation. His personality, as well, seems a quintessentially modern one. He is ironical and deflating, and not given to displays of feeling; he is measured and detached even when discussing events such as his recent divorce. We do not learn anything about what his parents are like, or even whether or not they are still living; he seems to have cut himself off from his origins, and to have very few ties to anyone. Apart from the Rat, who has gone on the lam, his closest bond is with J, an old Chinese bartender at what was once his favorite bar.
Despite his contained and neutral air, however, the narrator does not consider himself to be “regular” in the same way that his ad agency partner is; it is perhaps for this reason that he cannot let himself go to the degree that his partner (who is also unnamed, and is a heavy drinker) does. He is too invested in keeping his oddity a secret, as much from himself as from other people. However, this oddity is really only a heightened sensitivity to the oddity of the world around him, to which people like his partner blind themselves. He is particularly attuned to the loneliness of life, whether he is talking about sex–his mournful fixation on his girlfriend’s ears, his fascination with a disembodied whale penis–or about the diminishing beachside in his hometown. What these things all have in common is that they are partial and compromised, making the narrator yearn for some kind of a perfect, unifying whole. He is perhaps more romantic and religious–more old-fashioned–than he realizes.
The Girlfriend
The narrator’s girlfriend is a fractured creature whom the narrator moreover sees in a fractured way. She works as a prostitute, an ear model and a proofreader, and the narrator describes her as an unremarkable-looking woman with unusually beautiful ears. The beauty of her ears seems to reside not only in their physical appearance, but in some heightened quality of receptivity that they have, one that she can turn on and off. Her ears (when they are in their “receiving” state) cause the narrator to feel not only desire but something like religious transcendence.
While the narrator relies excessively on reason and logic, his girlfriend is all intuition. She is hopeless at packing for their trip to the mountains, causing the narrator to declare, “There was no reasoning with her” (229). Yet it is perhaps this very unreasonableness that makes her, much of the time, a superior navigator to the narrator; after all, it is not a reasonable, linear universe that they are navigating. It is she who leads the narrator to the Dolphin Hotel, where they come upon the Sheep Professor, who will set the rest of their quest in motion; it is also she who predicts the whole sheep quest to begin with, early in the novel. While the narrator notes these uncanny predictions of hers as they occur, they somehow do not cause him to generally rely on her abilities or to treat her with any special deference. Her main value to him is as a woman, which prevents him from seeing her fully, a blind spot for which he suffers as much as she does.
The Rat
The Rat can be seen as a more extreme, less-resigned version of the narrator. As his juvenile nickname suggests, he is someone who has never grown up or settled down; he compulsively moves around and changes his identities and occupations, in what seems an attempt to cheat time and to never grow old. He eventually commits suicide, therefore (in a sense) taking this attempt to its logical endpoint.
While the Rat is more anguished and obviously alienated than the narrator–or perhaps because he is these things–he sees some realities more clearly than the narrator does. He is more aware of his own weaknesses, and of the loneliness of the world in which he lives; he is facing his loneliness head-on, and has stopped trying to console himself–as he tells the narrator, in his final letter to him–with short-term jobs and casual affairs. He also recognizes and honors the narrator’s girlfriend’s psychic gifts, telling the narrator, “As you know very well, the girl’s got amazing powers” (338). In his guise as the Sheep Man, he tells the narrator that the reason why his girlfriend left the mountain was because, “Allyouthinkaboutisyourself” (298).
The Secretary/The Strange Man
While the other characters in the novel who are spirits or ghosts are identified as such–the Sheep Man, the Rat, the magical sheep itself–it is unclear whether the Secretary is real or imaginary. Like the narrator’s girlfriend, he seems to be a hybrid of both, a mortal with supernatural powers. Even more than the Boss, for whom he works, he seems to control the action in the novel and to possess a god-like omniscience; he is able, for instance, to track the narrator down at the bar where he has impulsively gone after their first meeting. The narrator is logically suspicious that the Secretary should know where he is at all times–and also know what he is thinking–while having no idea of the location of the magical sheep. As it happens, he is right to be suspicious, for it turns out that the Secretary has known the location of the meadow all along, and it remains a mystery why he has sent the narrator on an errand that he could as well have done himself, and moreover pronounced himself satisfied by the job that the narrator has done.
The Secretary’s most marked characteristic, apart from his omniscience, is his stillness. He is still in a way that is not peaceful, but that weighs down a room; in this way, there is something deathly about his aura. Given his way of always prevailing, and never being surprised by an outcome–also given the fact that he always wears a black suit—he might be said to be an embodiment of death. It is significant that, as such, he also represents an enormous shadowy media organization, as death and capitalism are equally dark forces in this novel.
The Sheep Man
The Sheep Man has an effect that is hard to describe. Much about him seems comical, absurdist, and harmless: his shortness and rotundity, his fast slurring way of speaking, and especially the fact that he is a man zipped into a sheep costume. Yet much about him is also disturbing and eerie. His comings and goings are unpredictable, and he enters the house where the narrator is staying with a total presumptuousness and lack of apology; the narrator, moreover, allows him to do this, and refers to him right away as the Sheep Man, as if he is a character with whom we are already acquainted. At the same time that the Sheep Man is presumptuous and gruff, however, he is evasive about the whereabouts of both the Rat and the narrator’s girlfriend, and there is a suggestion that he may have even “disappeared” the narrator’s girlfriend himself. He also has a disconcerting habit of referring to himself as “we.”
The reason for this–and also perhaps for the narrator’s immediate acceptance of his presence and sense of having known him all along–is because he is, in fact, two people, or, rather, two spirits. He is the Rat in another form: the Rat and an advance spokesperson for the Rat, at the same time. He has been sent by the Rat to stall the narrator until the Rat feels able to reveal himself, and also to reveal what has happened to him. The Sheep Man’s confusing way of communicating–being unable to reveal what has happened to the Rat, while also being unable to leave the narrator alone–can be seen to manifest the Rat’s own conflicted feelings about confiding in his friend.
There is a drawing of the Sheep Man, which is the only drawing in the novel (296). The drawing has something of the same abruptness and inexplicability as the character himself, and it is hard to know why it is there, which may be the point of it. The Sheep Man cannot completely be pinned down in words, and must be seen to be believed. In his slippery and complicated affect, his combination of familiarity and matter-of-fact weirdness, he is perhaps the most dreamlike of all of the novel’s characters.
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By Haruki Murakami
