A Wild Sheep Chase

“How many times did I dream of catching a train at night? Always the same dream. A nightliner stuffy with cigarette smoke and toilet stink.

The narrator is only a college student when he has this recurring dream, and already feels the sense of inertia and pointlessness that will haunt him later on. The dingy, run-down train that he dreams about catching is echoed in the actual train that he and his girlfriend will take later in the novel, on their quest to find the sheep. This is one of a few aspects of this first chapter–which in many ways seems separate from the rest of the novel–that resonates mysteriously throughout the book.  

“Sometimes I get real lonely sleeping with you.”

The loneliness of sex and intimacy is a preoccupation of the narrator’s, and also a theme in the novel. It is an act that tends to throw the narrator back on himself, rather than to bond him to another person. This quote comes from a woman–the college student of the first chapter–and is nothing that one can imagine the narrator saying, for all of his bewilderment. His loneliness is more existential than his partner’s, and he is more resigned to it. 

“Drunk as I get, I can walk those sixteen steps straight as a ruled line. The fruit of many years of pointless self-discipline.” 

These lines show the grip that the narrator has on himself, as well as his ironic sense of humor about this grip. His discipline comes from his solitariness, and from being a creature of habit. He knows himself well on the level of habit, and he knows that–unlike his ad agency partner, a heavy drinker who is married and has a family–if he goes too far there will be no one there to catch him; he must, therefore, be able to catch himself. 

“Some things are forgotten, some things disappear, some things die. But all in all, this was hardly what you could call a tragedy.” 

The narrator is referring here to his divorce, about which he is bewildered but not heartbroken. It is not so much the divorce itself that saddens him as it is the disappearance of someone familiar from his life, and, more generally, the way in which time makes things disappear. 

“It was then and there I came to the realization I have borne in mind ever since. Which is, that I am not a whale.”

hopeless and sad. His telling himself that he is not a whale seems an attempt to distance himself from this resonant sadness. At the same time, it seems a way of making his own intimate life seem small and inconsequential, which is a sadness in itself. 

“‘That’s because you’re only half-living,’ she said briskly. ‘The other half is still untapped somewhere.’”

The narrator’s girlfriend understands the narrator’s ghostly, “untapped” nature better than he does. She compares it to her own guardedness around her ears, which she does not dare to show to most people. 

“It is rather our role to take what unrealistic factors that exist and to work them into a more sophisticated form that might be grounded in the grand scheme of reality.”

Like much of what the Strange Man says, this is circuitous and nonsensical, but has a reasonable, businesslike sound. What he is basically saying is that his role is to take “unrealistic factors” and to make them appear real, by giving them a sheen of worldliness and sophistication. He is therefore doing, in this extract, exactly what he is talking about doing.

“Whether you take a doughnut hole as blank space or as an entity unto itself is a purely metaphysical question and does not affect the taste of the doughnut one bit.”

The narrator is here trying to decide whether it is fate or coincidence that caused the Strange Man to notice the photograph of the meadow. He then determines that it doesn’t matter, and that he is in the fix that he is in either way. This is typical of his stoicism and fatalism, which will be challenged later on in the novel. 

"It struck me as wanting that someone should confirm his own existence only by the hands of an electric wall clock.”

The narrator’s existence in Tokyo is often static and still, which is why he is always being so caught up short by the passage of time: the passage of time often does not seem to affect his daily life very much. Mentions of time, and references to clocks–most notably the grandfather clock in the farmhouse up on the mountain–appear consistently in this novel. 

“Even today, Japanese know precious little about sheep. Which is to say that sheep as an animal have no historical connection with the daily life of the Japanese.” 

The Strange Man is preparing to tell the narrator about the magical sheep, for which the narrator must search. This assertion–that sheep are a background oddity in Japanese life, having nothing to do with the history of the country but a part of the country nevertheless–will be echoed later on by the Sheep Professor, who is also obsessed with the magical sheep. Seen from this vantage point, the narrator’s quest to find the sheep can be seen as a way of coming to terms with his country’s strange history, as much as with himself.  

“The Boss is an honorable man. After the Lord, the most godly person I’ve ever met.” 

The Boss’s chauffeur claims to be on speaking terms with God and to be able to reach God by telephone. However, everything that we hear about the Boss suggests that he is the very opposite of “godly”: he is a former war criminal and right-wing militant turned shadowy multimedia figure. The only godly quality that he seems to have is his power and his pervasiveness. 

“It seems like we’re having a picnic, it’s so lovely.”

The narrator’s present girlfriend says this to him, as they are lying in bed together. It is an echo of what the narrator’s past girlfriend–the casual girlfriend of the first chapter–says to him. Further, this chapter title, “Sunday Afternoon Picnic,” is also an echo of that first chapter’s title, “Wednesday Afternoon Picnic.” This is one of several such echoes in this novel, and shows how much memory and association power the novel’s plot. The affect is of a narrator who is haunted and stuck, prone to recurrent obsessions and memories that he does not quite understand.  

“I closed the book, yawned, fell asleep.” 

The book that the narrator is talking about is a history of Junitaki-Cho, the township that he is about to visit with his girlfriend. It is a history that is not so much boring as it is slippery and hard to grasp, with many reversals and upheavals; it is also a frequently sad history, having little to do with progress. The narrator likely feels more overwhelmed and lost than bored, but it is a feeling that he mistakes–as he is in the habit of doing–for boredom. 

“Looking at things this way,” she said, comparing the left and right sides of the chronology, “we Japanese seem to live from war to war.” 

Here, the narrator’s girlfriend succinctly puts her finger on what has troubled the narrator about the township’s history, and has also–arguably—been a background force in his own life. This is an instance of the girlfriend’s perceptiveness, which the narrator often undervalues. 

“All the works of man faded into nothingness, yet still the sheep remained.” 

Compared to the fractured history of the Junataki province–and of Japan at large–the sheep seems to the narrator to have a mysterious stolidity and staying power. It seems eerily impervious to change, even while it is also a by-product of some of the country’s upheavals and failures.  

“The sheep change every year, it’s only me getting older.” 

This is a Junitaki shepherd speaking, who has a view of sheep (and of time) that is different from the narrator’s. He is comforted by the sameness of sheep, and also by their frequent rotation. Both of these things give him perspective on his own mortality. 

“We were totally alone. As if we’d been dropped off at the edge of the world.” 

The narrator and his girlfriend have in fact been dropped off by the shepherd at a bend in the road off the mountains, and they must make their way from here on out on foot. In a sense, however, it is also true that they have left the world as they know it, and are about to enter a different and more fantastical dimension. This also marks the first of several instances up in the mountains when the narrator mentions that he is alone, or lonely, or both. These instances suggest that he is actually waking up to a loneliness that he has had all along. 

“Loneliness wasn’t such a bad feeling. It was like the stillness of the pin oak after the little birds had flown off.”

Loneliness has been a constant feature of the narrator’s life, even or especially when he has been around other people. Up in the mountains, however–a time when he really is alone–he is able to find some perspective and even beauty in his solitude. This comes partly from the remote and wild landscape around him, and from a new sense that he has of being a part of this landscape. 

“There was no reasonable explanation possible from such unreasonable circumstances.”

The narrator is confused by the presence of the Rat’s Land Cruiser in the farmhouse garage, when the Rat himself is absent. This is far from the first “unreasonable” situation that the narrator has faced in the novel; it is, however, the first time that he does not attempt to master it with logic. This is perhaps because this particular unreasonable situation is more personal for him–concerning the disappearance of his old friend–and because, being far away from everything that he knows, he is less defended against it. 

“The Sheep Man was just like an animal. Approach him and he’d retreat, move away and he’d come closer.” 

The narrator is strangely quick to pick up on the Sheep Man’s nature, and to accept it and work with it. This is due to a destabilizing combination of familiarity and strangeness: the Sheep Man, beneath his weird costume, is more familiar to the narrator than he realizes, and the narrator is also in a new realm where the usual rules don’t apply, and nothing is strange any more.  

“Here I was, smack in the center of everything without a clue.”

The narrator has just found out that the harrowing and complicated quest that he has been sent on has been, in a sense, pointless, and that the Boss’s secretary has known the location of the meadow all along. He finds himself stranded—literally and metaphorically—up in the mountains, and it is significant that he should refer to such a remote spot as “the center of everything.” It is the center of everything for him because it is where he finally makes contact with his own life; moreover, his feeling of being trapped and bewildered, in the middle of a vast plot that he doesn’t understand, might be seen to refer to the general predicament of being alive, as well as to the narrator’s particular situation. 

“It wasn’t myself I was seeing; on the contrary, it was as if I were the reflection of the mirror and this flat-me-of-an-image were seeing the real me.”

The narrator feels a sense of doubleness and disembodiment, up on the mountains, that is an extreme version of the self-consciousness and alienation that he has felt for much of his life. His reflection in the mirror is more real to him than he himself is, and seems to have a separate consciousness from his own. This is in fact a common feeling to have upon looking in the mirror, and is also a common effect of living, as many of us do, in a world of appearances and surfaces. It is just that the narrator seems to be in touch, for the first time, with the strangeness and scariness of this feeling. 

“I had a terrifying dream. Too terrifying to recall.” 

The narrator has this dream as he is on the verge of seeing the Rat, and the dream–“too terrifying to recall”–can be seen to set the stage for the Rat’s appearance. “Too terrifying to recall” is a strange formulation, and suggests that there are some terrors that are just too big to retain in our memories, even while we recall them as terrifying. The narrator is about to learn that the Rat is now dead–is a ghost—and we can infer that the dream has something to do with death and nothingness.