53 pages • 1 hour read
Haruki MurakamiA Wild Sheep Chase
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1982A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “November 25, 1970”-Part 2: “July, Eight Years Later”-Part 3: “September, Two Months Later”
Chapter 1 Summary: “Wednesday Afternoon Picnic”
In this first chapter of the novel, which serves as a prologue thereto, the narrator, a 29-year-old advertising copywriter living in Tokyo, learns of the death of a woman with whom he had an affair in college. The woman was killed at age 26, hit as a pedestrian by a passing truck. The narrator learns of her death through a newspaper clipping, read out loud to him by a friend; although he can no longer remember the woman’s name, he attends her funeral and briefly acknowledges her father: “On leaving, I lowered my head in silence, and he lowered his head in return, without a word” (4).
The narrator spends the remainder of the chapter recalling what he can of the woman. She left home at 16, was an avid reader, and was sexually promiscuous; her relationship with the narrator was impersonal, casual, and drug and alcohol-fueled, in a way that the narrator describes as typical of the time: “You know, the stuff of everyday. Meanwhile, the curtain was creaking down on the shambles of the sixties” (5).
The “Wednesday afternoon picnic” of the chapter title refers to a weekly ritual that the narrator had with this woman, where they would lie down together on the campus green during sunny days. While this woman is never again mentioned in the novel, several aspects of her story and her affair with the narrator echo throughout the book. The stifling routine and loneliness of their time together evokes the narrator’s subsequent relationships with women–as well as his lonely and automated lifestyle in general—while the fleeting idyll of their “picnic” is echoed in the narrator’s later time up on the mountain. Her sudden death anticipates the disappearance and death of the narrator’s friend, Rat, and the fact that she herself predicts her own death—and even asks the narrator if he has ever thought about killing her—anticipates both the fate and the psychic tendencies of the narrator’s later girlfriend.
Chapter 2 Summary: “Sixteen Steps”
This chapter jumps to the narrator’s present-day existence in Tokyo. He is coming home drunk the morning after having attended his ex-girlfriend’s funeral, and he discovers a strange woman sitting alone at his kitchen table. The woman is his soon-to-be-ex-wife, come to collect the remainder of her things from his apartment. He tells his ex-wife about the accident and the funeral, and she asks him bitterly, “‘Tell me, if I died, would you go out drinking like that?’” (20). They have a brief conversation that is rancorous, pragmatic, and fatigued, and the woman–who has evidently already been married and divorced once before–tells the narrator that she still loves him but that she knows that this is no longer “‘the point’” (22).
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Slip”
In this brief chapter, the narrator ruminates over his ex-wife and their failed marriage. He recalls an American novel in which the protagonist keeps his ex-wife’s slip draped over his living room chair as a reminder of her presence. The narrator himself seems bewildered by the end of his marriage–we learn that his wife initiated the divorce and that she had been having an affair with his friend–but not precisely heartbroken. He categorizes his failed marriage in terms that are both vague and bleakly realistic: “Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you would call a tragedy” (26).
Chapter 4 Summary: “The Whale’s Penis and the Woman with Three Occupations”
In this chapter, the narrator introduces us to his present girlfriend–the “woman with three occupations” of the chapter title. These occupations are (in descending order of importance) an ear model, a prostitute, and a proofreader. The narrator unsentimentally describes his girlfriend as an average-looking woman who happens to possess an extraordinary pair of ears. He first becomes aware of her through her ears, which appear in an advertisement for which he is supposed to write copy. He is immediately smitten, tracks her down through her “agency,” and takes her out to dinner.
The whale’s penis of the chapter title refers to a disembodied whale’s penis that the narrator saw in an aquarium as a young boy, and that has haunted him ever since, especially in regard to his own sex life. The penis, in its unearthly and stranded appearance, evokes for the narrator “a singular, somehow unspeakable aura of sadness” (30). It causes him to muse about the loneliness and randomness of sex, even while he also reminds himself, “[…] I am not a whale” (31).
Chapter 5 Summary: “Unblocked Ears”
In this very brief (half-a-page long) chapter, the narrator’s girlfriend, while they are still on their first dinner date, shows him her ears in their “unblocked state” (45). By this, she seems to mean not only a state of visibility, but some less-obvious state of psychic receptiveness that enhances her ears’–and therefore her overall–beauty. Gazing at her, the narrator feels something that is akin to religious transcendence: “She’d become so beautiful, it defied understanding [...] it transcended all concepts within the boundaries of my awareness” (45). The narrator tells us that this is the first night that they sleep together.
Chapter 6 Summary: “The Further Adventures of Unblocked Ears”
The narrator learns more about his new girlfriend’s ears, which affect not only him but everyone else around her. She has therefore had to learn how to be extremely deliberate about how and under what circumstances she shows them. She tells the narrator that she never shows her ears to any of her “clients,” and that he is the only man in her life who sees them regularly. When he asks her why this is, she tells him that it is simply because he sought her out. She also tells him that she thinks that he and she are similar: “‘[…] you’re not unlike me. I’m sitting on my ears, and you’ve got only half of you that’s really living’” (47).
As they are falling asleep in his bed one afternoon, the narrator’s girlfriend sleepily predicts to him that he will receive an important phone call soon, that this phone call will concern sheep, and that it will be “the beginning of a wild adventure” (49). Sure enough, the narrator’s partner at the advertising agency soon calls him and asks him to come in as soon as possible; the narrator jokingly asks him if the emergency has to do with sheep, and his partner more or less confirms that it does: “‘How did you know?’” (49).
Chapters 1-6 Analysis
These opening chapters of the novel are fairly realistic, compared to what is to come. The strangeness lies more in the narrator’s own mind than in any of the external workings of the plot. On the surface, these chapters depict an aimless and lonely young man, leading a complacent but rootless urban existence: a type, and a lifestyle, that might be familiar to many readers.
One quietly strange aspect of these chapters, however, is the way in which they are divided up. The first chapter is also Part 1 of the book, separating it off from the other chapters. Part 2 of the book jumps ahead eight years later and is composed of two chapters. Part 3 of the book then jumps ahead two months later and is composed of three chapters. Some of these chapters, in turn, are extremely short; some of them–as in the case of the narrator’s extended rumination on his girlfriend’s ears, which takes up two chapters in Part 3 of the book–are divided up in a way that seems arbitrary. All of this gives the narration a halting, stuttering quality, and suggests a narrator who is struggling to tell his own story. The organizing of chapters into parts, moreover, and the lengthy, mock-epic titles of chapters in which little happens–“The Further Adventures of Unblocked Ears”–suggest a degree of hampering self-consciousness on the narrator’s part, and show how little self-consciousness can have to do with self-awareness. It is as if the narrator is so busy framing his story, simultaneously puffing it up and making a joke out of it, that he has lost sight of the story itself.
The narrator’s habitual jokiness and evasiveness serves to occlude a deep sadness and bewilderment. He is haunted by the passage of time, and also by his failures in love; he is haunted by his own lack of affect and the shrugging ease with which he both falls into bed with women and says goodbye to them. He has created a static and comfortable existence for himself, one based on work routines, distant friendships and copious beer-drinking, in order to keep both time and intimacy at bay, but both of these elements keep intruding anyway. He impulsively goes to the funeral of a woman with whom he had a casual affair in college; though he cannot now even remember her name, or very much else about her either, she serves as a sort of portal for larger musings about time and death. He recalls a recurrent dream that he had, in his college days, about being stuck on a dingy train going nowhere: “A nightliner stuffy with cigarette smoke and toilet stink. So crowded there was hardly standing room. The seats all caked with vomit” (8). This is a train that anticipates the run-down wilderness train that the narrator and his girlfriend will ride much later in the novel, on their way to search for the sheep.
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