A WILD SHEEP CHASE
Haruki Murakami, translated by Alfred Birnbaum
Tokyo and New York: Kodansha International, 1989
263 pp., $18.95
I used to feel grateful to the Seattle Times for carrying Dave Barry's column since they were obviously doing it just for me. That particular brand of off-the-wall humor couldn't possibly appeal to anyone else. Then I found out that Dave Barry had won the Pulitzer Prize and is read by millions of people, many of whom are nearly sane.
Take Dave's recent column on male obsessions with sports, for example, in which he reveals that large numbers of apparently normal men spend many of their waking hours "managing PRETEND BASEBALL TEAMS." Dave remarks: "This is crazy, right? If these guys said they were managing herds of pretend caribou, the authorities would be squirting lithium down their throats with turkey basters, right? And yet well all act like it's PERFECTLY NORMAL."
Dave Barry can actually make a living writing commentary like this because something in his brain produces those caribou out of thin air, taking us completely by surprise in a way that turns on the laughter switch. We don't ask him where the caribou come from or what they symbolize: We just enjoy laughing at the sheer outrageousness of his imaginative leaps.
We look for similar comic boldness from Woody Allen, Kurt Vonnegut, John Irving, and others, but not from Japanese writers - until now.
“I dreamed about a dairy cow…We passed each other on a big bridge…The cow was carrying an old electric fan in one hoof, and I asked whether she wouldn't sell it to me cheap.
‘I don't have much money,’ I said. Really, I didn't.
‘Well then,’ said the cow, ‘I might trade it to you for a pair of pliers.’”
Compare this dream from A Wild Sheep Chase (1982) with a "parable" in Woody Allen's My philosophy:
“I am given a message to deliver to a general. I ride and ride, but the general's headquarters seem to get farther and farther away….I cannot catch the general, whom I see running in the distance in his shorts and whispering the world ‘nutmeg’ to his enemies.”
Why nutmeg? Why pliers?
In the universe of Haruki Murakami, a man can begin hallucinating from a potentially fatal brain condition, and soon one of his hallucinatory images - a strangely marked sheep - comes to exist in the "real" world. This "real" world now contains something "that by all rights should not exist." The fact that it does exist, though, in undeniable. Here it is. We can see it, photograph it. But of course, we can do so only if we live in Haruki Murakami's "real" world.
Murakami has said in an interview that fundamental to this work is a tendency to contrast
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