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 7-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 4: “A Wild Sheep Chase, I”
Chapter 7 Summary: “Before the Strange Man”
The narrator introduces us to his partner, whom he describes as both an average, nice guy and an alcoholic. He tells us that his partner’s alcoholism has created a rift between the two of them, as he knows that there will always be a certain point in the evening when his partner will become unreasonably drunk and he will then have to take his leave of him.
When the narrator arrives at the office, his partner is already sipping a whiskey. He greets the narrator, asks him about his recent divorce, and then worries aloud to him that their business has become corrupt and exploitative, if also lucrative. The narrator laughs away these concerns: “‘Exploitation doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale’” (57). This brief conversation (and chapter) is a prelude to the real business that the narrator’s partner has called him in to discuss: that of the “strange man.”
Chapter 8 Summary: “Now the Strange Man”
The narrator’s partner now describes the strange man of the chapter’s title to the narrator. He describes the strange man as an elegant, inscrutable-looking man who came into the office earlier that morning, while the partner himself was out. The man spoke to their secretary and said that he would wait until the partner returned. As he waited on a couch, the secretary became aware of his unusual stillness and powerfully heavy, somber aura: “By the time my partner returned from the bank, the atmosphere in the room had grown noticeably heavy. You might say everything in the room seemed practically nailed to the floor” (61).
The narrator’s partner then explains the man’s business to the narrator. He tells the narrator that the man first presented him with a business card, asked him if he recognized the name on the card–he did–and then requested that he burn the card with a lighter. After the partner did so, the man then demanded that he stop publication of a life-insurance commercial, featuring a photograph of a meadow and some sheep. He also demanded that he see the man responsible for this ad campaign, which explains the narrator’s presence in the office. His partner tells him that a car will be sent for him soon, delivering him to this man.
Chapter 9 Summary: “The Boss”
Having described the strange man, the narrator’s partner now fills the narrator in on the background of “the Boss,” the man for whom the strange man works as a personal secretary. The Boss–who never appears in this novel, but is only talked about–is a powerful background force in both politics and advertising. He comes from a humble background, and was a drifter and then a war criminal before becoming a shadowy right-wing figure. He is now rumored to be unwell.
The sinister extent of the Boss’s influence is summarized by the narrator’s partner in the following terms: “‘There’s not a branch of publishing or broadcasting that doesn’t depend in some way on advertising. It’d be like an aquarium without water’” (68).
Chapter 10 Summary: “Counting Sheep”
Alone in his apartment, the narrator muses over the significance of the sheep photograph, and whether to regard it as a manifestation of fate or mere coincidence. He decides that it doesn’t make a personal difference to him either way, and, by way of analogy, invokes a donut hole: “Whether you take a donut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the donut one bit” (72).
He then looks at the advertisement itself: counting the sheep in the photograph, he is puzzled to see first thirty-two and then thirty-three sheep. He then drifts into sleep.
Chapter 11 Summary: “The Limo and Its Driver”
The narrator is brought to the Boss’s house in a luxurious limousine. In the well-appointed limousine, he notices a pack of cigarettes imprinted with a sheep emblem. The limousine driver confirms that the Boss is ill, and therefore that his illness is no longer a secret.
The narrator then falls asleep during the remainder of the drive, and has a strange and apparently meaningless dream about trading a fan with a cow for a pair of pliers: “I prayed that there wasn’t some kind of symbolism to the dream” (78).
Chapter 12 Summary: “Wherefore the Worm Universe”
The narrator reflects on his dream and on dreams in general, invoking what he calls “the worm universe” (79). By this, he seems to mean the slippery border between dreams and wakefulness. He notes that in this worm universe, “there is nothing unusual about a dairy cow seeking a pair of pliers” but that his own role in the dream changes everything, because he feels a need to argue with the cow and to make sense of the cow’s quest: a futile endeavor and “a worm’s eye view of the universe” (79).
He then describes the grand house at which the driver has deposited him as “surely the epicenter of the worm universe” (80).It is a house that is both breathtaking and incoherent, a rambling mansion that is composed of many disparate, ill-fitting parts. Like Japan itself, the house is a hybrid of tradition and modernity, and the narrator finds it to be “[…] a painfully solitary building” (81).
He is conducted by the chauffeur into an elegant waiting room, filled with antiques and still-life paintings. After a ten-minute interval, the Boss’s secretary appears, without a word of acknowledgement or welcome. The two men stare at one another in silence, and the narrator must remind himself that “[t]ime was surely passing” (83).
Chapters 7-12 Analysis
These chapters introduce the narrator’s public self, as distinct from his private one. Where we have previously known little about the narrator, apart from his intimate life, we now learn about where he works (at an advertising agency) and how he conducts himself in the world. From the narrator’s conversation with his partner in Chapter 7, in which his partner prepares to tell him about “the strange man” who will change both of their lives, we can see that the narrator is someone who prides himself on his worldliness and “realism” (a word that will prove to have a very relative meaning, in this novel) and his degree of sensible self-containment. In response to his partner’s concerns about their business being exploitative, the narrator says dismissively, “Exploitation doesn’t exist. It’s a fairy tale…I think you think too much” (57). He also–although he himself drinks a fair amount –is made wary by his partner’s overt alcoholism. This is perhaps because his partner’s sloppy addictions remind him of his own more carefully-managed ones, just as his partner’s susceptibility and emotionalism reminds him of his own more-muted fears and sorrows.
These chapters also introduce the quest of the novel’s title, and with it some of the more surreal, fantastical elements of this novel. There is the character of the Boss’s secretary–also known as the “strange man”–with his eerie ability to weigh down a room, and the character of the Boss himself, with his mysterious omnipotence and centrality. There is also the sudden importance of a random photograph of sheep, and the hoops through which the narrator is suddenly required to jump. His response to being bullied by faceless authorities and to having his livelihood suddenly threatened, however, is strangely measured and logical. Rather than get angry, he looks carefully at the problem from different angles, using language akin to that in a business memo: “My placing a photo of sheep in the life insurance company’s P.R. bulletin can be seen from one perspective, (a) as coincidence, but from another perspective, (b), as no coincidence at all” (72). He then shrugs and concludes that he is in trouble either way: “Whether you take a doughnut hole as a blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit” (72).
A stranger formulation of the narrator’s–although it is presented in the same logical terms as his musings about fate and coincidence–is that of the “worm universe,” in Chapter 12. The term recalls the “wormhole” that is a part of the theory of Einstein’s theory of relativity, in which separate points in spacetime are linked (wormholes have not been proven to actually exist). However, the narrator’s “worm universe” seems to refer specifically to the divide between dreams and reality. The narrator does not only believe that dreams can symbolize reality; he also believes that “there are symbolic realities–realities that can symbolize a dream” (79). This belief of the narrator’s precedes the strange events that have recently taken place in his life, and suggests that, beneath his reasonable exterior, he is all too accustomed to weirdness. More broadly, it suggests that logic, taken to its outer limits, can lead to a kind of absurdity, especially against the backdrop of modern-day capitalist society.
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