Haruki Murakami - A Wild Sheep Chase

“Yes.”

“I’m twenty-two. I suppose things get better as time goes on.”

“Well,” I said, “who knows? Some things get better, some don’t.”

“It’d be nice if we could get together and discuss things over dinner.”

“You’ll have to excuse me, but I’ve got to stay here and wait for a call.”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Sorry about everything.”

“Anyway, thanks for calling.”

I hung up.

Clever, very clever. A call girl, maybe, looking for some business. True, she might really have been just a lonely girl. Either way it was the same. I still had zero leads.

The following day there was only one call, from a mentally disturbed man. “A rat you say? Leave it to me.” He talked for fifteen minutes about fending off rats in a Siberian camp. An interesting tale, but no lead.

While waiting for the telephone to ring, I sat in the half-sprung chair by the window and spent the day watching the work conditions on the third floor office across the street. Stare as I might all day long, I couldn’t figure out what the company did. The company had ten employees, and people were constantly running in and out like in a basketball game. Someone would hand someone papers, someone would stamp these, then another someone would stuff them into an envelope and rush out the door. During the lunch break, a big-breasted secretary poured tea for everyone. In the afternoon, several people had coffee delivered. Which made me want to drink some too, so I asked the desk clerk to take messages while I went out to a coffee shop. I bought two bottles of beer on the way back. When I resumed my seat at the window, there were only four people left in the office. The big-breasted secretary was joking with a junior employee. I drank a beer and watched the office activities, but mainly her.

The more I looked at her breasts, the more unusually large they seemed. She must have been strapped into a brassiere with cables from the Golden Gate Bridge. Several of the junior staff seemed to have designs on her. Their sex drive came across two panes of glass and the street in between. It’s a funny thing sensing someone else’s sex drive. After a while, you get to mistaking it for your own.

At five o’clock, she changed into a red dress and went home. I closed the curtain and watched a Bugs Bunny rerun on television. So went the eighth day at the Dolphin Hotel.

“Just great,” said I. This “just great” business was becoming a habit. “One-third of the month gone and we still haven’t gotten anywhere.”

“So it would seem,” said she. “I wonder how Kipper’s getting on?”

After supper, we rested on the vile orange sofa in the Dolphin Hotel lobby. No one else around except our three-fingered clerk. He was keeping busy, up on a ladder changing a light bulb, cleaning the windows, folding newspapers. There may have been other guests in the place; perhaps they were all in their rooms like mummies kept out of the light of day.

“How’s business?” the desk clerk asked timidly as he watered the potted plants.

“Nothing much to speak of,” I said.

“Seems you placed an ad in the papers.”

“That I did,” I said. “I’m trying to track down this one person on some land inheritance.”

“Inheritance?”

“Yes. Trouble is the inheritor’s disappeared, whereabouts unknown.”

“Do tell. Sounds like interesting work.”

“Not really.”

“I don’t know, there’s something of Moby Dick about it.”

“Moby Dick?”

“Sure. The thrill of hunting something down.”

“A mammoth, for example?” said my girlfriend.

“Sure. It’s all related,” said the clerk. “Actually, I named this place the Dolphin Hotel because of a scene with dolphins in Moby Dick.”

“Oh-ho,” said I. “But if that’s the case, wouldn’t it have been better to name it the Whale Hotel?”

“Whales don’t have quite the image,” he admitted with some regret.

“The Dolphin Hotel’s a lovely name,” said my girlfriend.

“Thank you very much,” smiled the clerk. “Incidentally, having you here for this extended stay strikes me as most auspicious, and I’d like to offer you some wine as a token of my thanks.”

“Delighted,” she said.

“Much obliged,” I said.

He went into a back room and emerged after a moment with a chilled bottle of white wine and three glasses.

“A toast. I’m still on the job, so just a sip for me.”

We drank our wine. Not a particularly fine wine, but a light, dry, pleasant sort of wine. Even the glasses were swell.

“You a Moby Dick fan?” I thought to ask.

“You could say that. I always wanted to go to sea ever since I was a child.”

“And that’s why you’re in the hotel business today?” she asked.

“That’s why I’m missing fingers,” he said. “Actually, they got mangled in a winch unloading cargo from a freighter.”

“How horrible!” she exclaimed.

“Everything went black at the time. But life’s a fickle thing. Somehow or other, I ended up owning this hotel here. Not much of a hotel, but I’ve done all right by it. Ten years I’ve had it.”

Which would mean he wasn’t the desk clerk, but the owner.

“I couldn’t imagine a finer hotel,” she encouraged.

“Thank you very much,” said the owner, refilling our wineglasses.

“For only ten years, the building has taken on quite a lot of, well, character,” I ventured forth unabashedly.

“Yes, it was built right after the war. I count myself most fortunate that I could buy it so cheaply.”

“What was it used for before it was a hotel?”

“It went by the name of the Hokkaido Ovine Hall. Housed all sorts of papers and resources concerning …”

“Ovine?” I said.

“Sheep,” he said.

“The building was the property of the Hokkaido Ovine Association, that is, up until ten years ago. What with the decline in sheep raising in the territory, the Hall was closed,” he said, sipping his wine. “Actually, the acting director at the time was my own father. He couldn’t abide the thought of his beloved Ovine Hall shutting down, and so on the pretext of preserving the sheep resources he talked the Association into selling him the land and the building at a good price. Hence, to this day the whole second floor of the building is a sheep reference room. Of course, being resource materials, most of the stuff is old and useless. The dotings of an old man. The rest of the place is mine for the hotel business.”

“Some coincidence,” I said.

“Coincidence?”

“If the truth be known, the person we’re looking for has something to do with sheep. And the only lead we’ve got is this one photograph of sheep that he sent.”

“You don’t say,” he said. “I’d like to have a look at it if I might.”

I pulled out the sheep photo that I’d sandwiched between the pages of my notebook and handed it to him. He picked up his glasses from the counter and studied the photo.

“I do seem to have some recollection of this,” he said.

“A recollection?”

“For certain.” So saying, he took the ladder from where he’d left it under the light and leaned it up against the opposite wall. He brought down a framed picture. Then he wiped off the dust and handed the picture to us.

“Is this not the same scenery?”

The frame itself was plenty old, but the photo in it was even older, discolored too. And yes, there were sheep in it. Altogether maybe sixty head. Fence, birch grove, mountains. The birch grove was different in shape from the one in the Rat’s photograph, but the mountains in the background were the same mountains. Even the composition of the photograph was the same.