Traveling in Murakami's The Wild Sheep Chase

The act of traveling seems to hold significance for Murakami, and he has also published many self-reflective accounts of his travels. I found it interesting that since Murakami himself finds traveling to be a transformative experience, he puts his protagonist into similar scenarios, and is inspired to include the names, landscapes, and atmospheres he uncovered on his trips in his novels.  In The Wild Sheep Chase, the protagonist has to travel from Tokyo to rural Hokkaido, and the process of putting himself in an unfamiliar environment allows him to delve deeper into his consciousness.

For example, when boku is traveling back to his hometown at the beginning, he says, “Boarding a long-distance train without any luggage gave me a feeling of exhilaration. It was as if while out taking a leisurely stroll, I was suddenly like a dive-bomber caught in a space-time warp. In which there is nothing: no dentist’s appointments, no pending issues in desk drawers, no inextricably complicated human involvements, no favors demanded. I’d left that behind, temporarily. All I had with me were my tennis shoes with their misshapen rubber soles. They held fast to my feet like vague memories of another space-time.” He would also have a recurring dream of catching a train at night. 

He later says,  “I don’t know how to put it, but I just can’t get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn’t quite hit home. It’s always been this way. Only much later on does it ever come together. For the last ten years, it’s been like this” (Chapter 22).  

It seems like boku is so emotionally disconnected from his life, that he has lost that grounded sense of reality of time and space, and in actuality craves to cut off any of his loose ties to the world and exist simply in a void. It could be said that he mentally is always on a train to somewhere else when he is at home.

Once they get to Hokkaido, his girlfriend says, “I feel like something’s out of place”, and he replies, “That’s what it’s like, coming to a new city. Your body can’t quite get used to it.’”(Chapter 25). 

From my interpretation, it seems that in urban Tokyo the protagonist had entered into a state of complacency and disconnect, and only by traveling to a new, unfamiliar place, where he becomes an attentive observer of the life around him, is he able to break free and have a transformation in his consciousness. For example, near the end of the novel he displays an unprecedented episode of rage by breaking the Rat’s guitar, and in the epilogue he says, “I sat down on the last fifty yards of beach, and I cried. I never cried so much in my life.”  He goes from having a colorless existence, to seeing everything in vivid detail, as can be seen with his descriptions throughout the novel. He transfers the emotional displacement he feels within himself to be reflected in his physical displacement, and through that he is able to finally feel present.

Alessandra Leone