Boku’s “Pilgrimage” in Haruki Murakami’s A Wild Sheep Chase

The Murakami quote referencing his insertion of Japanese tradition into a western literary frames continues to come up in our class discussions. I can not help but consider what other western writers have influenced A Wild Sheep Chase, other than Raymond Chandler’s The Long Goodbye. When Boku stated, “whether you take the doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question” to his girlfriend, I realized that, though it is a detective narrative, the detective components are metaphysical. He is not in search of the sheep, but of a meaning to life. I found that this structure resembled that of a “pilgrimage” that is often written about in classic British literature.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress or Jeffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales remind me of Murakami’s method. The main figure of the story takes a journey in search of some form of religious end, guided by God. Murakami is not on a religious journey, but is on a spiritual one, and uses the religious traditions to imply this.

The detective elements are postmodern in the sense that there are not actual clues (as in The Long Goodbye), but more allegorical and magical, guiding Boku to his end. As how in traditional pilgrimage narratives the figure is guided by a celestial being, Boku is guided by magic-like, metaphysical elements like his girlfriend’s ears, and the Rat. He also has an epiphany of sorts by the end of the narrative. Though not a religious epiphany, I feel that Murakami uses the pilgrimage structure to conclude with the binary realization of which those classic narratives usually end. The “epiphany” that Boku makes at the end of his “pilgrimage” is much more sad, absurdist, and maybe nihilist. Rather than a religious finding, he comes to a much more lonely and mundane image of society. He notes toward the end that “loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of a pin oak after the little birds had flown off.” The pilgrimage that Boku goes on ultimately seems to lead him to cynical realization.

Lexi