Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

A new theory.

“Well,” said I, “suppose I utterly obliterated my consciousness and became totally fixed, would I merit a fancy name?”

The chauffeur glanced at my face in the rearview mirror. A suspicious look, as if I were laying some trap. “Fixed?”

“Say I froze in place, or something. Like Sleeping Beauty.”

“But you already have a name.”

“Right you are,” I said. “I nearly forgot.”

We received our boarding passes at the airport check-in counter and said goodbye to the chauffeur. He would have waited to see us off, but as there was an hour and a half before departure time, he capitulated and left.

“A real character, that one,” she said.

“There’s a place I know with no one but people like that,” I said. “The cows there go around looking for pliers.”

“Sounds like ‘Home on the Pampas.’”

“Maybe so,” I said.

We went into the airport restaurant and had an early lunch. Shrimp au gratin for me, spaghetti for her. I watched the 747s and Tristars take flight and swoop down to earth with a gravity that seemed fated. Meanwhile, she dubiously inspected each strand of spaghetti she ate.

“I thought that they always served meals on planes,” she said, disgruntled.

“Nope,” I said, waiting for the hot lump of gratin in my mouth to cool down, then gulping down some water. No taste but hot. “Meals only on international flights. They give you something to eat on longer domestic routes. Not exactly what you’d call a special treat, though.”

“And movies?”

“No way. C’mon, it’s only an hour to Sapporo.”

“Then they give you nothing.”

“Nothing at all. You sit in your seat, read your book, and arrive at your destination. Same as by bus.”

“But no traffic lights.”

“No traffic lights.”

“Just great,” she said with a sigh. She put down her fork, leaving half the spaghetti untouched.

“The thing is you get there faster. It takes twelve hours if you go by train.”

“And where does the extra time go?”

I also gave up halfway through my meal and ordered two coffees. “Extra time?”

“You said planes save you over ten hours. So where does all that time go?”

“Time doesn’t go anywhere. It only adds up. We can use those ten hours as we like, in Tokyo or in Sapporo. With ten hours we could see four movies, eat two meals, whatever. Right?”

“But what if I don’t want to go to the movies or eat?”

“That’s your problem. It’s no fault of time.”

She bit her lip as we looked out at the squat bodies of the 747s on the tarmac. 747s always remind me of a fat, ugly old lady in the neighborhood where I used to live. Huge sagging breasts, swollen legs, dried-up neckline. The airport, a likely gathering place for the old ladies. Dozens of them, coming and going, one after the other. The pilots and stewardesses, strutting back and forth in the lobby with heads held high, seemed quaintly planar. I couldn’t help thinking how it wasn’t like the DC-7 and Friendship-7 days, but maybe it was.

“Well,” she went on, “does time expand?”

“No, time does not expand,” I answered. I had spoken, but why didn’t it sound like my voice? I coughed and drank my coffee. “Time does not expand.”

“But time is actually increasing, isn’t it? You yourself said that time adds up.”

“That’s only because the time needed for transit has decreased. The sum total of time doesn’t change. It’s only that you can see more movies.”

“If you wanted to see movies,” she added.

As soon as we arrived in Sapporo, we actually did see a double feature.

The entire flight, she sat by the window and looked down at the scenery. I sat next to her reading my Adventures of Sherlock Holmes . Not a single cloud in the sky the whole time, the airplane riding on its shadow over the earth. Or more accurately, since we were in the plane, our shadows figured as well inside the shadow of the airplane skimming over mountain and field. Which would mean we too were imprinted into the earth.

“I really liked that guy,” she said after drinking her orange juice.

“That guy who?”

“The chauffeur.”

“Hmm,” I said, “I liked him too.”

“And what a great name, ‘Kipper.’”

“For sure. A great name. The cat might be better off with him than he ever was with me.”

“Not ‘the cat,’ ‘Kipper.’”

“Right. ‘Kipper.’”

“Why didn’t you give the cat a name all this time?”

“Why indeed,” I puzzled. Then I lit up a cigarette with the sheep-engraved lighter. “I think I just don’t like names. Basically, I can’t see what’s wrong with calling me ‘me’ or you ‘you’ or us ‘us’ or them ‘them.’”

“Hmm,” she said. “I do like the word ‘we,’ though. It has an Ice Age ring to it.”

“Ice Age?”

“Like ‘We go south’ or ‘We hunt mammoth’ or …”

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.”

“Sounds positively inviting,” I said.

She soon fell asleep, leaving me gazing through the bus windows at the endless procession of deep forest on both sides of the road.

We hit a coffee shop first thing on arriving in the city.

“Right off, let’s set our prime directives,” I said. “We’ll have to divide up. That is, I go after the scene in the photograph. You go after the sheep. That way we save time.”

“Very pragmatic.”

“If things go well,” I amended. “In any case, you can cover the major former sheep ranches of Hokkaido and study up on sheep breeds. You can probably find what you need at a government office or the local library.”

“I like libraries,” she said.

“I’m glad.”

“Do I start right away?”

I looked at my watch. Three-thirty. “Nah, it’s already getting late. Let’s start tomorrow. Today we’ll take it easy, find a place to stay, have dinner, take a bath, and get some sleep.”

“I wouldn’t mind seeing a movie,” she said.

“A movie?”

“What with all that time we saved by flying.”

“Good point,” I said. So we popped into the first movie theater that caught our eye.

What we ended up seeing was a crime-occult double feature. There was hardly a soul in the place. It’d been ages since I’d been in a theater that empty. I counted the people in the audience to pass the time. Eight, including ourselves. There were more characters in the films.

The films were exemplars of the dreadful. The sort of films where you feel like turning around and walking out the instant the title comes on after the roaring MGM lion. Amazing that films like that exist.

The first was the occult feature. The devil, who lives in the dripping, dank cellar of the town church and manipulates things through the weak preacher, takes over the town. The real question, though, was why the devil wanted to take over the town to begin with. All it was was a miserable nothing of a few blocks surrounded by cornfields.