The Third Ear

     As I was finishing A Wild Sheep Chase, I was struck by the theme of dissociation within one’s own body/self that seems to appear multiple times throughout the book. To me, Murakami seems to be exploring concepts of consciousness versus subconsciousness, and the whole story feels like a metaphor for different paths through mental illness. My exploration starts with Boku’s girlfriend’s ears. 

When Boku first meets his girlfriend for dinner, she states “blocked ears are dead ears. I killed my own ears” (p. 40). Boku goes on to summarize what she has just told him, saying “. . . at such times that you must show your ears, you block off the passageway between your ears and your consciousness“ (p. 40), a statement which she affirms. However, Boku’s girlfriend never describes why it is necessary to create separation between her ears and her consciousness. This separation does lead one to consider that if her ears are separate from her consciousness, perhaps by default they are part of her subconscious. In their first conversation, she also tells Boku about her interest in psychology, stating she is taking a correspondence course in psychology. Based on this, she (and Murakami) would be familiar with basic concepts of psychoanalysis. One such concept is the idea of the third ear. Philip Bromberg describes the third ear as such: 

“One of the peculiarities of this third ear1 is that it works in two ways. It can catch what other people do not say, but only feel and think; and it can also be turned inward. It can hear voices from within the self that are otherwise not audible because they are drowned out by the noise of our conscious thought processes” (Bromberg, 29).
This concept lends itself to the multiple instances throughout the book in which Boku’s girlfriend seems to have clairvoyant ability, such as when she predicts the emergence of the sheep in Boku’s future or senses that they need to stay at the Dolphin Hotel. While Boku is often caught up in his thoughts and anxieties, his girlfriend seems to be capable of channeling a quiet calm that allows here to ‘listen’ per se. Thus, her ears serve as a connection not only to her subconscious but what seems to be a collective subconscious. 

The collective subconscious is a space which can have positive impacts, such as finding the Dolphin Hotel, but can also be negative, leaving one’s subconscious open to inhibition by another, potentially parasitic, being. The primary example of this is the sheep. The sheep enters via the subconscious -- people’s masked desires and weaknesses, a slice of pie in the Rat’s case (an allusion to his nickname?), through their dreams as with the Sheep Professor (p. 221), or via hallucinations as with the Boss (p. 142). Once the individual is dominated by their subconscious rather than their conscious, their free will is lost.

Boku experiences a moment where his grasp of himself starts to slip after he cleans the mirror. He describes looking at himself in the mirror, saying, “it wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me” (p. 319). He goes on to discuss whether he or the figure in the mirror really have any free will. He moves his hand, and so it moves its hand. Or is it vice versa? Similarly, we can wonder whether we have any control over ourselves, or if our subconscious has the ability to override any logical decision making. 

After this reflection, it feels more clear why Boku’s girlfriend is hesitant to show her ears and effectively “kills them”. By cutting the link between her subconscious and conscious, she retains her free will. She recognizes the power of her ears and occasionally taps into that power, but she also sees how the subconscious can be a dangerous place. Boku symbolically escapes this by eventually blowing up the mirror, untethering himself from this other self that may or may not control him. Finally, the rat escapes this control by waiting for the right moment. “‘I died with the sheep inside me. I waited until the sheep was fast asleep, then I tied a rope over the beam in the kitchen and hanged myself. There wasn’t enough time for the sucker to escape’” (p. 332). 

In reflection, this fear of the subconscious and its control over us seems most akin to a person’s struggle with mental illness. We often feel that we would choose a different life for ourselves, but a force within us makes this seem impossible. Murakami explores a dissociation between the self that is autonomous and the self that is compulsory by giving the compulsory self a character, whether it be the sheep, the mirror self, or the ears. His narrative explores how we might sever this connection, providing a commentary on coping mechanisms such as compartmentalization, withdrawal, and suicide. 

 

Natalia 

B    Bromberg P.M. (1984) The Third Ear. In: Caligor L., Bromberg P.M., Meltzer J.D. (eds) Clinical Perspectives 

 

on the Supervision of Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Critical Issues in Psychiatry (A Series for Clinicians). Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-3653-0_2

 

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