Transportation in The Long Goodbye and A Wild Sheep Chase

Haruki Murakami has (along with nearly every author on the face of the planet) taken inspiration from various influences. One of these authors is hardboiled detective fiction legend Raymond Chandler, who’s series detailing the adventures of detective Phillip Marlowe gripped more than just the American consciousness. The Long Goodbye may be the Chandler novel Murakami took the greatest inspiration from, using Marlowe’s escapades as influence for Boku’s escapades in novels such as A Wild Sheep Chase. One way in which these novels align in an interesting way is using transportation as a setting, serving to figuratively transport the protagonist and the reader to another world.

In The Long Goodbye, this world is corrupting wealth. The first major image (on the very first page) focused on in the book is Terry Lenox’s Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith. It’s the first time Marlowe and the reader are introduced to Terry, immediately juxtaposed with his “plastered to the hairline” drunkenness. Even the comparative everyman Marlowe is entrapped by the look of the car (noting that “nothing can” make the Rolls-Royce look like just another automobile), but Terry, drunk off his leash, cannot acknowledge it, “not even bothering to look.” The car’s juxtaposition serves as the introduction to the setting of The Long Goodbye, a high-class Los Angeles full of exploitable but comparatively realistic low-class characters.

Yet in A Wild Sheep Chase, the wealth Boku suddenly comes across doesn’t just serve as transportation to a figurative world, it may be to a literal one. This transformation happens a sixth of the way into the book, not on page one, unlike The Long Goodbye. After the appearance of “The Strange Man,” the chief underling of “The Boss,” Boku officially leaves his office life when he goes into a black limousine summoned by The Strange Man. The focus on wealth is immediately made present here (“An impoverished family could have lived under the hood of that car”), like in The Long Goodbye. But there’s also differences. Chandler used showcases of wealth to mainly highlight the downsides of characters. But here, Murakami seems to be using wealth to highlight a descent into weirdness. The silver cigarette case inside the limo bearing the emblem of the sheep, and the limo serves as the catalyst for one of Boku’s “symbolic daydreams.” The limo scene is not the only scene where transportation serves as an important setting, but it is the earliest and most comparable to Chandler. Overall, these relatively brief scenes not only showcase Murakami’s influences, but also where he does not strictly follow them.

-William Asher