Love in A Wild Sheep Chase and The Long Goodbye

Love in Murakami and Chandler. 

    After finishing both A Wild Sheep Chase and The Long Goodbye I found it interesting to compare their respective love stories rather than focusing on the detective or mystery element of the texts. At the heart of both books is love lost and love found adding to the greater theme of loss and identity that are apparent. 

    In Murakami's story, our protagonist Boku opens by telling us about a dead woman he had a relationship with years and years before. Her name is lost to him but not the time they spent together. We're then told he was married, and he quickly transitions to recounting his divorce. We get hints of the love they once shared but mostly we are left with a single man existing in the aftermath left by his now ex-wife. Until he finds love again with the woman with the ears. in a beautiful yet tragic way, she chose that woman from all those years ago at university. Love found. Then, just like that same woman, his girlfriend is lost when she abandoned him with the sheep. Love lost again. 

    Love is similarly gained and stolen in Chandler's novel. Eileen Wade had Paul Martson aka Terry Lennox. The two were married then lost to each other. Although Eileen disregards Terry as still being the man she loved. Eileen then goes on to find Roger but much like with Boku's marriage it suffers from infidelity and increasing problems. Similar, to how Boku's girlfriend is trailed by the shadow of the young woman from university so is Marlowe a warped image or echo of Paul. She latches on to him in the dark knowing he's not Paul but hoping for a piece of some lasting remnant of that "perfect" man from her past. 

    In the end, Eileen loses Paul, Roger, and Marlow just as Boku loses the three women he was involved with. Marlow as the detective of our hard-boiled story is not expected to reach the end of the novel with a lasting love interest. The genre does not allow for it and the reader knows not to expect it; however, Eileen is hardly the traditional femme fatale, and her fate was not predestined for tragedy. As someone personally unfamiliar with Murakami's work I cannot speak to whether there was an expectation for Boku's girlfriend but it is interesting to see him suffer more similarly to Chandler's "villain" rather than his hero. 

Jade Rona