Discussion Questions for Suter, The Japanization of Modernity

1. Suter discusses how Murakami’s protagonists act as the translator between the world of the novel and the reader. What are some of the strategies boku uses in A Wild Sheep’s Chase to make sense of the strange things happening around him? How does that play into and utilize the wider Hard Boiled genre, and the detective fiction Murakami often pulls from?

2. Why do you think that Murakami writes his protagonists as only boku, with no names or identifiers? Do you agree with Karatani’s interpretation that this implies, “names, like clothes that can be easily taken off, are superficial accessories, without any real connection to the person”?

3. According to the text, Murakami has a certain idea of what a writer is like, and what they must do. Writers “put order into the chaos of the contemporary world,” give voice to the voiceless victims, construct stories out of patterns of human behavior, and generally act as interpreters between a story and the reader (112). Where do you see evidence of this belief in Murakami’s writing? Do you agree with this interpretation of the significance of writers/novelists?

4. What Murakami mean by claiming that writers have “responsibility” over their own stories? What kind of responsibilities do writers have for the things they create?

-Amanda Berke

Literary allusion in The Long Goodbye and A Wild Sheep Chase

In gratitude for a ride back to Hollywood, Philip Marlowe offers the poems of T. S. Eliot to Linda Loring’s driver Amos, to which he responds “he already had them” (237). Amos later recites lines from Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, a dramatic monologue in stream of consciousness, to Marlowe. Allusions to Eliot are both overt and implied in The Long Goodbye. Marlowe’s interiority is methodological in its narration of thoughts and events. While trying to glean the significance of Marlowe and Amos’ exchange, Eliot’s line “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” recalled the intent focus in Chapter 5 on brewing coffee despite “a gun in the hand of a desperate character” (28). Like Prufrock, Marlowe elevates inconsequential happenings of his day-to-day. In Chapter 13 Marlowe conjures a hypothetical blonde who “speaks softly out of nowhere and you can’t lay a finger on her because in the first place you don’t want to and in the second place she is reading The Waste Land or Dante in the original…” (90). He dismisses the intellectual and convivial capability within his invented trope of anemic blonde intellectuals, akin to Prufrock’s refrain “In the room the women come and go / Talking of Michelangelo.”

In A Wild Sheep Chase, a woman from the narrator’s college years is also characterized by a progression of books but boku does not disdain her for being well-read. Her choice of novels are contemporaneous with the setting, ranging from Beat poet Allen Ginsberg to Japanese writer Kenzaburō Ōe. Boku mentions reading The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes repeatedly, first after receiving instruction to locate the sheep and finally before the Sheep Man visits the house in the Hokkaido mountains. Sherlock Holmes is not mentioned again after their interaction; boku abandons the “ratiocination” of the book and his own quest. He later picks up a Joseph Conrad novel from the Rat’s room. Popular texts by Conrad like Heart of Darkness are thought to be intentionally ambiguous much like Murakami’s own writing. The reader’s expectation of a conventionally satisfying ending from A Wild Sheep Chase are subverted like Stefano Tani identifies in his definition of the postmodern anti-detective novel: “…the inanity of the discovery is brought to its climax in the nonsolution, which unmasks a propensity towards disorder and irrationality that has always been implicit within detective fiction” (46).

Bella Bennett

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

Reflection on Where I'm Likely to Find it

    When the story started off, I thought it was going to follow the storyline of hardboiled-fiction stories that we talked about in class. I was waiting for the husband and/or the mother-in-law to be found dead, and then the beautiful female client will get exposed for commiting the crime. However, nothing really happened in this short story. The missing husband was found in other city without his memories, and everyone continues living on normally. The female client seeking out the protagonist's help was unnecessary, and the protagonist's search for the missing husband was also unnecessary. 

    I felt empty when I finished reading this story, and I couldn't understand the purpose. I wondered if there was actually something deeper/abstract that the protagonist was searching for, or if there was meaning behind the husband losing his memories. It felt like the protagonist wasted his time searching for clues for his client. On the other hand, I think concluding the story with "nothing" is what makes the story relatable. Everyone has times where they worked hard on something but don't attain anything. Time was lost to the futile attempt to achieve something. 

-Rose Zheng

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 

A Wild Sheep Chase and Entangled Life

 A Wild Sheep Chase and Entangled Life

While reading A Wild Sheep Chase I was thinking a lot about how Murakami represents the natural world, especially at the end of the text. This world seems imbued with a sense of agency and personality that almost gives it a human-like quality. This reminded me of Tim Ingold’s book The Perception of the Environment, and in particular his chapter titled “Totemism, Animism, and the Depiction of Animals.” In this chapter Ingold discusses the unique way that the Ojibwa people view personhood. The Ojibwa do not limit the idea of personhood to humans, but many features in the natural world including trees, rocks, and animals are thought of as ‘persons’. Instead of things possessing the quality of life in a sort of static and permanent way, the Ojibwa people refer to living things as “beings alive,” which posits an ongoing process of living, where life is constantly generated. This treatment of the natural world breaks down the dichotomy of human vs. nature and instead humans are thought of as one part of a complex environment, and they are deeply affected by said environment. 

To me, this all seemed very similar to the environment that Murakami creates in Hokkaido at the end of the text. Boku is profoundly affected by his physical environment and undergoes many mental changes at the end of the text. His temporal ideas of the world are skewed; he remarks “time regressed like a film running backward” and he imagines a Hokkaido in the past, populated with animals and not people (Murakami 265). In this way, one gets the sense that the natural world is indescribably old and filled with all sorts of stories that humans are not privy to, which de-centers the idea that humans are the center/most important part of a natural environment. While driving up the mountain, Boku says that “you could smell [the rock face’s] menacing breath” (Murakami 271). In personifying the natural environment it becomes a character in the story, given agency and its own motives and desires. One gets the sense that the physical environment is responding to Boku’s arrival and in turn Boku is profoundly influenced by the environment. 

In addition to the environment as a whole, sheep are also given a certain sense of personhood in this text. While the caretaker is driving Boku and his girlfriend up the mountain he says, “‘You bet they quarrel…It’s the same with any animal that goes around in groups. Each and every sheep has a pecking order in sheep society’” (Murakami 270). In this way, the sheep are given the quality of interiority and one sees that they are a complex society. The most interesting interaction between humans and the natural world to me was the idea that the sheep could enter humans. This is perhaps the most radical rejection of the idea that the world is filled with individual, impermeable beings. The Rat had the sheep inside of him. He says to Boku, “‘I died with the sheep in 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’” (Murakami 332). The drastic measures that Rat goes to to kill the sheep shows that this is not a metaphor of interconnectedness but that the sheep literally merged with him in such a way that the only way to kill it was to kill himself. 

Maggie Farren

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