Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

“Mountains are living things,” wrote the author in his preface to the book. “Mountains, according to the angle of view, the season, the time of day, the beholder’s frame of mind, or any one thing, can effectively change their appearance. Thus, it is essential to recognize that we can never know more than one side, one small aspect of a mountain.”

“Just great,” I said out loud. An impossible task. At the five o’clock bell, I went out to sit on a park bench and eat corn with the pigeons.

Her efforts at information gathering fared better than mine, but ultimately they were futile too. We compared notes of the day’s trials and tribulations over a modest dinner at a restaurant behind the Dolphin Hotel.

“The Livestock Section of the Territorial Government knew next to nothing,” she said. “They’ve stopped keeping track of sheep. It doesn’t pay to raise sheep. At least not by large-scale ranching or free-range grazing.”

“In a way that makes the search easier.”

“Not really. Ranchers still raise sheep quite actively and even have their own union, which the authorities keep tabs on. With middle-and small-scale sheep raising, however, it’s difficult to keep any accurate count going. Everyone keeps a few sheep pretty much like they do cats and dogs. For what it’s worth, I took down the addresses of the thirty sheep raisers they had listings for, but the papers were four years old and people move around a lot in four years. Japan’s agricultural policies change every three years just like that, you know.”

“Just great,” I sighed into my beer. “Seems like we’ve come to a dead end. There must be more than a hundred similar mountains in Hokkaido, and the state of sheep raising is a total blank.”

“This is the first day. We’ve only just begun.”

“Haven’t those ears of yours gotten the message yet?”

“No message for the time being,” she said, eating her simmered fish and miso soup. “That much I know. I only get despairing messages when I’m confused or feeling some mental pinch. But that’s not the case now.”

“The lifeline only comes when you’re on the verge of drowning?”

“Right. For the moment, I’m satisfied to be going through all this with you, and as long as I’m satisfied, I get no such message. So it’s up to us to find that sheep on our own.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “In a sense, if we don’t find that sheep we’ll be up to our necks in it. In what, I can’t say, but if those guys say they’re going to get us, they’re going to get us. They’re pros. No matter if the Boss dies, the organization will remain and their network extends everywhere in Japan, like the sewers. They’ll have our necks. Dumb as it sounds, that’s the way it is.”

“Sounds like The Invaders.”

“Ridiculous, I know. But the fact is we’ve gotten ourselves smack in the middle of it, and by ‘ourselves’ I mean you and me. At the start it was only me, but by now you’re in the picture too. Still feel like you’re not on the verge of drowning?”

“Hey, this is just the sort of thing I love. Let me tell you, it’s more fun than sleeping with strangers or flashing my ears or proofreading biographical dictionaries. This is living.”

“Which is to say,” I interjected, “we’re not drowning so we have no rope.”

“Right. It’s up to us to find that sheep. Neither you nor I have left so much behind, really.”

Maybe not.

We returned to the hotel and had intercourse. I like that word intercourse . It poses only a limited range of possibilities.

Our third and fourth days in Sapporo came and went for naught. We’d get up at eight, have breakfast, split up for the day, and when evening came we’d exchange information over supper, return to the hotel, have intercourse, and sleep.

I threw away my old tennis shoes, bought new sneakers, and went around showing the photograph to hundreds of people. She made up a long list of sheep raisers based on sources from the government offices and the library, and started phoning every one of them. The results were nil. Nobody could place the mountain, and no sheep raiser had any recollection of a sheep with a star on its back. One old man said he remembered seeing that mountain in southern Sakhalin before the war. I wasn’t about to believe that the Rat had gone to Sakhalin. No way can you send a letter special delivery from Sakhalin to Tokyo.

Gradually, I was getting worn down. My sense of direction had evaporated by our fourth day. When south became opposite east, I bought a compass, but going around with a compass only made the city seem less and less real. The buildings began to look like backdrops in a photography studio, the people walking the streets like cardboard cutouts. The sun rose from one side of a featureless land, shot up in a cannonball arc across the sky, then set on the other side.

The fifth, then the sixth day passed. October lay heavy on the town. The sun was warm enough but the wind grew brisk, and by late in the day I’d have to put on a thin cotton windbreaker. The streets of Sapporo were wide and depressingly straight. Up until then, I’d had no idea how much walking around in a city of nothing but straight lines can tire you out.

I drank seven cups of coffee a day, took a leak every hour. And slowly lost my appetite.

“Why don’t you put an ad in the papers?” she proposed. “You know, ‘Friends want to get in touch with you’ or something.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said. It didn’t matter if we came up empty-handed; it had to beat doing nothing.

So I placed a three-line notice in the morning editions of four newspapers for the following day.

Attention: Rat

Get in touch. Urgent!

Dolphin Hotel, Room 406

For the next two days, I waited by the phone. The day of the ad there were three calls. One was a call from a local citizen.

“What’s this ‘Rat’?”

“The nickname of a friend,” I answered.

He hung up, satisfied.

Another was a prank call.

“Squeak, squeak,” came a voice from the other end of the line. “Squeak, squeak.”

I hung up. Cities are damn strange places.

The third was from a woman with a reedy voice.

“Everybody always calls me Rat,” she said. A voice in which you could almost hear the telephone lines swaying in the distant breeze.

“Thank you for taking the trouble to call. However, the Rat I’m looking for is a man,” I explained.

“I kind of thought so,” she said. “But in any case, since I’m a Rat too, I thought I might as well give you a call.”

“Really, thank you very much.”

“Not at all. Have you found your friend?”

“Not yet,” I said, “unfortunately.”

“If only it’d been me you were looking for … but no, it wasn’t me.

“That’s the way it goes. Sorry.”

She fell silent. Meanwhile, I scratched my nose with my little finger.

“Really, I just wanted to talk to you,” she came back.

“With me?”

“I don’t quite know how to put it, but I fought the urge ever since I came across your ad in the morning paper. I didn’t mean to bother you …”

“So all that about your being called Rat was a made-up story.”

“That’s right,” she said. “Nobody ever calls me Rat. I don’t even have any friends. That’s why I wanted to call you so badly.”

I heaved a sigh. “Well, uh, thanks anyway.”

“Forgive me. Are you from Hokkaido?”

“I’m from Tokyo,” I said.

“You came all the way from Tokyo to look for your friend?”

“That’s correct.”

“How old is this friend?”

“Just turned thirty.”

“And you?”

“I’ll be thirty in two months.”

“Single?”