Journal of a Sabbatical

The Travel Diaries

Hokkaido 1997

October 15, 1997

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A Wild Sheep Chase

It's 10:05 PM EDT Oct. 15 at home. I have no idea what time zone I'm passing over up here. I've been up since 3:00AM and yet I don't feel like I could sleep if I tried.

I just finished reading A Wild Sheep Chase by Haruki Murakami. I read it straight through. It's been sitting on my to be read pile for months, but once I got into it I just kept reading to find out what the heck the sheep was about. I still don't know. The sheep seemed to be some evil, addictive force bent on world domination. The journey was the thing, though. A road trip worthy of a Fridrik Thor Fridrikson movie. The whole book has a film noir feeling to it, like the protagonist is a younger, Japanese, surreal Philip Marlowe but Marlowe as imagined by an Icelandic troll. The Japanese are deeply Icelandic in this novel. They accept hardship and magic and inexplicable forces matter of factly. Parts of this reminded me so much of Cold Fever I was beginning to wonder if Murakami had influenced Fridrikson. Some of my favorite passages:

When we stepped outside at Chitose Airport, the air was chillier than we'd expected. I pulled a denim shirt over my t-shirt, she a knit vest over her shirt. Autumn had come over this land one whole month ahead of Tokyo. "We weren't supposed to run into an Ice Age, were we?" she asked on the bus to Sapporo. "You hunting mammoths, me raising children."

Whether you take the 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.

"What the sheep seeks is the embodiment of sheep thought." "Is that good?" "To the sheep's thinking of course it's good."

The sky was appallingly clear. A sky from a prewar expressionist movie. Utterly cloudless, like a monumental eye with the eyelid cut off.

This novel was supposed to last me the entire trip from Boston ...

 

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