I Read Haruki Murakami’s ‘A Wild Sheep Chase’.

Murakami’s legacy to me had always been that he writes books that feel like dreams. In my mind what that signifies is that things are bigger and larger. Those stories border on fantasy and that reason and logic are thrown to the wolves to be torn to shreds, and we use those shreds to tie rope bridges to nowhere together.

There’s a different dreamlike quality about Murakami’s work that doesn’t land anywhere near what I had initially considered. After reading a few of his stories, I can confirm that the comparison is there, however it lands more on the whispy and intangible end of the spectrum. While these are experiences that all take place in our minds through his vocabulary, if this was a visual piece, I believe that so many of them would have multiple actors playing the same characters in the same scenes. Voices would change. Music would swell and dim in the background of B Roll footage for no reason other than our intended mindstate was meant to feel a little seasick. There is a Lynchian quality to what he writes, and while it’s almost completely free of the campiness of Twin Peaks in particular, there is the sense that the path we follow to get to the end of these stories is not the conventional path we would expect to take, and what’s more, the characters and resolutions we end up with at the end of the tale might not even match with the ones that we’ve taken on in the very beginning.

This book sees us through with a main character being served an ultimatum in order to sort out a ‘mystery’ for a faceless organization and instead of being driven by fear or by necessity, it almost seems that he does so out of a lack of better things to do in his day. As he walks out into the solution of it all, people cling to him, circumstances cling to him, and in a completely aloof stupor, he continues forth with a self-sustained sense of inertia. The internal dialog keeps us more engaged than the dialog he has with the characters he encounters. And while those characters do seem to hold a sense of importance to him and to the story, we are mostly consumed by our protagonist’s thoughts and observations. He isn’t headstrong. He isn’t narcissistic. I don’t believe so, anyway. Most of his all-encompassing engagement seems to stem from his comfortability in his own loneliness and solitude. In the way that most of his life has played out, this journey included, he seems to remain unaffected by the rising tides of people and circumstances in his life, only moving forward, whatever may erode away.

While I do admire the sense of self-sufficiency of the character, by the climax of the story we start to see exactly what that level of density can do to the relationships and scenarios around us. Are the bonds we are creating even bonds at all, or are they just elongated engagements? If we are deriving joy from these interactions but not allowing them to shape us for the better, are they even worth having? If we don’t acknowledge that anything is at stake when we are met with hardship, are we even exhibiting the bravery and fortitude to conquer the obstacles we’re faced with?

I asked myself a lot of questions about this character throughout the reading of it and started to wonder a lot about how our inner voice and pressing determination might muck up the works of how we actually interact and how we think we interact and also what we say about those interactions. In a convoluted way, perhaps not even the thesis of this novel, I think I learned a lot about how we appear on a stage, and how we operate as a unit within a greater whole, even if we can’t conceive the whole intuitively. I’ll be thinking about this one a lot for a few days and weighing a lot about the consequences and rewards and penalties we face by always showing a tough exterior without yielding.