A Wild Sheep Chase: Temporal Themes

I like to listen to Japanese albums while I read, during Haruki Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase I listened primarily to the 70's Jazz albums from Ryo Fukui and this album from 1978, how fitting. Murakami uses unsettling, descriptive imagery; like cells being replaced or thoughts being momentary, to drive his core temporal themes. For example, the main character's wife was preoccupied with the concept of cell turnover to explain that the person you were a week ago is technically not the same person you are now and thus you should only focus on people in the now. People you remember have already gone because they are in your memories. More so, no one has a name but they do have titles or attributes that become their "names" such as the woman with the ears or the Sheep Professor or The Chauffeur or the Secretary. Everyone is essentially objectified and I wonder if this is meant to suggest that no one exists. Not to say this story is taking place in a dream or anything, but that the theme of existence vs. not is also represented in the lack of naming characters. There's a commitment when people have names and this surreal theme is supported when Murakami chose not to assign names to characters.

In Japanese media, there are common themes about good vs. evil, or rather lack thereof. Forces with roots in folklore are simply accepted by the general public: benign. Murakami raises some questions about this moral confusion in A Wild Sheep Chase. Through the Secretary, he chooses to put people into two categories: the mediocre realists and the mediocre dreamers. It is here where we may imply the sheep's motivations to inhabit the boss and other like-minded people; people who are not mediocre. 
Murakami supports this theme by describing seemingly mundane aspects of life in a stream-of-conscious way through the main character, but with purpose. When the main character drinks or shaves, he tells the reader, as if he's just recording his thoughts in a logbook. But slowly, these mundane aspects of the main character's life become unusual; such as his courtship with the ear woman or his life on the mountain. In each sequence, we become aware that something is not-quite-right through Murakami's alarming, subtle description of the main character's descent into "madness" within these mundane details. Mundanity is supposed to be safe; benign, but Murakami clearly finds something disconcerting to pull from our mundane experiences, and this is why it terrifies us so (or me.) 

To contribute to this benign terror, we, the audience, are always bounced around to the middle of a story or going-ons. We are provided with just enough information, like the dialogue with the main character and his ex wife in the kitchen. Most information is gained from dialogue between characters. There is just enough information given to us to gather who these people are and how they came to be. In other words, the audience is not given enough information to be omniscient, and it bothers readers.

The Junitaki-cho mountain sequence was a series of chapters that disturbed me the most. The anxiety began on the train ride through the historical retelling that the main character read. However, most of this sequence was facilitated by the character of The Sheep Man; I found I was anxious throughout the last half of the novel because of this character. I felt something was deeply wrong. Either The Sheep Man did not exist or this whole chase was in fact, a setup. Then it is revealed, through the mirror, that he is some sort of a hallucination or ghost. Absolutely terrifying. Again, it was terrifying because The Sheep Man was truly benign. Did he ever harm the main character? No. He just spoke and walked funny. He never gave the audience a reason to feel threatened. He just showed up one day at the estate's door, but my god was his existence disturbing and his transition into the Rat even more so.

Sequences and characters; such as the boss' mansion or The Sheep Man, are eerie because they are benign. Sure, there are veiled threats from the Secretary, "It is still the same. For you and for me, there is only whether you find the sheep or not. There are no in-betweens. I am sorry to have to put it this way, but as I have already said, we are taking you up on your proposition. You hold the ball, you had better run for the goal. Even if there turns out not to have been any goal," and that entire discussion became increasingly unsettling and left me hypnotized. But I believe for that reason, because the Secretary is right: there is no goal, but the implication of that was very disconcerting. Characters' motivations are never really known, it's beyond mystery, it's a maze of psychological manipulation that makes this experience terrifying. Everyone, except the audience, runs on this creepy intuition about the main character's actions. Seemingly harmless and meaningless conversations later compound into deeper concepts. The story plays in the landscape of the reader's mind.