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.
Symbols & Motifs
The Sheep
The sheep that the narrator is searching for is described in vague but foreboding terms, by the people whom it has inhabited. The Rat tells the narrator that the sheep desires “a realm of total conceptual anarchy”(225); the Sheep Professor tells him that the sheep has “[a] monumental plan to transform humanity and the human world” (223). The Boss’s secretary–speaking for the Boss, who has also been inhabited by the sheep–tells the narrator that the sheep is “a v-e-r-y special sheep” (144).
Ordinary farm sheep also appear in this novel, and the narrator finds something eerie in their blankness and stolidity: “Their eyes were an unnatural blue, looking like tiny wellsprings flowing from the sides of their heads […] They all stared at me. They seemed to think as a group” (257-58). Sheep are the ultimate herd animal, and are not known for their individual will, let alone for the sort of ultimate will that the Rat and the Sheep Professor describe. They are also an animal that is non-indigenous to Japan, and that never quite thrived in Japan; in this way, they are a reminder of some of the country’s failings and missteps. As the Sheep Professor tells the narrator, Japan never learned how to regard sheep as anything but farm animals, failing to see the animal’s spiritual side in the way that the Chinese did.
It is therefore strange that an animal like a sheep should have so much power, to the point of being able to control the minds of men. The sheep with the star on its back can be seen to evoke the ancient Chinese notions of sheep that the Sheep Professor mentions, and to therefore be a symbol of Japanese identity confusion. It might also be seen to manifest something much more modern: the kind of herd thought and “conceptual anarchy” to which technological innovation and unbridled capitalism can lead. While this book was written before the advent of the internet and social media, it is easy to imagine these things as fitting in with the sheep’s plan for world domination. As the Sheep Professor again states, “What the sheep seeks is the embodiment of sheep thought” (225).
The Whale Penis
The narrator is haunted by a disembodied whale penis that he saw in an aquarium as a young boy. He remembers it the first time that he has sex: “What twists of fate, what tortuous circumnavigations, had brought it to that cavernous exhibition room? My heart ached, thinking about it” (30). He elsewhere states that humans are not whales, and that “this constitutes one great theme underscoring our sex life” (29).
What the narrator seems to feel about the whale penis is a combination of empathy and yearning. While he does not elaborate on how the sex lives of whales differ from those of humans, it seems likely that he regards whale mating as something more primal and mysterious than human mating. His view of human mating is unsentimental: “There’s sex for self-improvement start to finish and there’s sex for killing time straight through; sex that is therapeutic at first only to end up as nothing-better-to-do, and vice versa” (29).
The whale penis strikes the narrator as a forlorn and ridiculous sight, barely resembling an organ at all; in a parallel way, the sex life of (modern) humans strikes him as hardly being sex at all. It strikes him as transactional and empty, disconnected from its original purpose and power. It makes the narrator feel stranded and lonely, although stranded from what, exactly, he isn’t sure. He can only state mournfully that he is “not a whale” (31).
Unblocked Ears
The narrator’s girlfriend’s ears are her best physical feature: so distractingly beautiful that she must hide them behind her hair most of the time. Their beauty is not only physical, but resides in a special aura that they radiate. Ears are receiving organs, and the girlfriend’s “unblocked ears” exude a receptivity that goes well beyond merely being “a good listener,” and that seems to be connected to her intuitive, psychic gifts.
The narrator both values and undervalues his girlfriend’s ears; he tends to focus on their physical appearance, rather than on the personal qualities that they reveal. His incomplete way of seeing his girlfriend’s ears–and of seeing his girlfriend in general—shows the incomplete nature of intimacy: how we can only see people, even people close to us, in pieces. The girlfriend’s own view of the narrator is relatively (and characteristically) perceptive. She tells him that he is “only half-living”: “The other half is still untapped somewhere […] In that sense, you’re not unlike me. I’m sitting on my ears, and you’ve got only half of you that’s really living” (47).
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By Haruki Murakami
